— Christine M. Kukka, Project Manager, HBV Advocate
Various medical organizations worldwide have suggested that patients
who achieve undetectable viral loads for long periods can stop taking
antivirals—but a recent report in the World Journal of Gastroenterology says no one really knows when it’s safe to stop treatment.
Antivirals, administered in daily pills, meddle
with the viral DNA to make it hard for the virus to replicate. They
work well while they’re taken, but even after months or years of
undetectable HBV DNA, the virus can come creeping back when patients
stop taking antivirals.
“…There is [a] lack of sufficient data on
off-treatment durability of highly potent (antivirals),” researchers
wrote in the June issue. “Based on the available evidence, current
guidelines for stopping (antiviral) therapy seem to be inadequate in
terms of off-treatment durability (whether viral load will remain low),
with relapse rates of more than 40% for both hepatitis B e-antigen
(HBeAg)-positive and HBeAg-negative patients.”
Therefore, more studies are needed to establish
when patients can stop treatment in order to develop accurate
guidelines for doctors, they asserted.
Source: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24966590
Labels: stopping antivirals
