Author information

¹Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Electronic address: kingw@edc.pitt.edu.

²Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia.

³Epidemiology Department, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

⁴Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

⁵Infectious Disease Research, Abbott Diagnostics, Abbott Park, Illinois.

⁶Liver Diseases Branch, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

⁷Biostatistics Department, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

⁸Hepatology and Liver Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts.

⁹Toronto Centre for Liver Disease, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.

¹⁰Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Department of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California.

¹¹Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.

¹²Liver Disease, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas.

¹³Washington University School of Medicine; John Cochran VA Medical Center, St. Louis, Missouri.

¹⁴Division of Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases, Keck Medicine of University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.

Abstract

In chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection, hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) and hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) clearance are important milestones toward immune control.¹ A drop in HBV DNA is an established correlate of both HBeAg and HBsAg clearance.² We evaluated changes in HBV RNA and hepatitis B core-related antigen (HBcrAg) levels, markers of transcriptional activity of covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA),^3,4 with HBeAg and HBsAg clearance, and compared them with changes in HBV DNA level among adult participants in the Hepatitis B Research Network (HBRN).