You are here

  • Home
  • Archive
  • Volume 73, Issue 11
  • Non-linear association of baseline viral load with on-treatment hepatocellular carcinoma risk in chronic hepatitis B: still needs further discussion

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
PostScript
Letter
Non-linear association of baseline viral load with on-treatment hepatocellular carcinoma risk in chronic hepatitis B: still needs further discussion
  1. Taiyu He,
  2. Dazhi Zhang
  1. Department of Infectious Diseases, Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology for Infectious Diseases (Ministry of Education), Institute for Viral Hepatitis, the Second Affiliated Hospital, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China
  1. Correspondence to Professor Dazhi Zhang, Department of Infectious Diseases, Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology for Infectious Diseases (Ministry of Education), Institute for Viral Hepatitis, the Second Affiliated Hospital, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China; 300595{at}hospital.cqmu.edu.cn

https://doi.org/10.1136/gutjnl-2023-331443

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    We read with great interest the recent article by Choi et al.1 By analysing the data of a multicentre historical cohort including 4693 adult patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB), they concluded that patients with moderate baseline viral loads, particularly around 6 log10 IU/mL, demonstrated the highest on-treatment hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) risk. Because this conclusion is interesting and different from the findings of some previous studies,2 3 which may affect the timing of treatment initiation for many patients with CHB, findings of this study should be cautiously viewed. Here, we highlight some points that need further discussion.

    First, the authors investigated the association between on-treatment HCC risk and various baseline characteristics. However, some indicators (recently emerging biomarkers: quantified hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg)4 5; common clinical characteristics: serum albumin,2 diabetes …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors TH and DZ drafted and revised the manuscript. Both authors approved the submitted version.

    • Funding This work was supported by Remarkable Innovation-Clinical Research Project, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University and The First batch of key Disciplines on Public Health in Chongqing, Health Commission of Chongqing, China

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.