Is there a cure for hepatitis? A look at treatments
Written in association with:
Hepatologist
Published: 15/12/2017
Edited by: Jay Staniland
The treatment for viral hepatitis will depend on the virus causing the hepatitis in the first instance. For example, hepatitis A and hepatitis E tend to be acute and self-limiting infections meaning they get better themselves.
The difficulty with viral hepatitis is the viruses which cause more chronic disease and lead to chronic liver disease. These are specifically hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and in some cases, hepatitis D or delta virus which is a super co-infection with hepatitis B.
Hepatitis C
There are new, very effective antiviral drugs available which have been shown to eradicate the virus in up to 95% of patients in a relatively short period of time, sometimes from only 8 or 12 weeks.
Hepatitis B
Hepatitis B is more challenging in that there is currently no cure. When it is treated, the patient is virally suppressed which reduces the virus to very low levels, where it is not believed to cause harm.
This means that with hepatitis B, patients will quite often be required to be on medication for a very long period of time, or even lifelong in some cases.
Future developments in hepatitis treatment
There are significant changes afoot with new drugs in development which should improve the chance of achieving a cure for hepatitis B.
Pegylated interferon is still being used in a proportion of patients, which works by boosting the host’s immune response against the virus, essentially helping the patient to control the virus themselves.
A lot of developments will be seen over the coming years in the treatment of hepatitis B as this is currently an area of very rapid development.
FibroScan
One of the latest developments in the diagnosis and management of viral hepatitis is the use of FibroScan. FibroScan is essentially a non-invasive modality for us to assess the degree of liver damage or liver disease in patients presenting with viral hepatitis.
Previously, doctors would often need to perform a liver biopsy to assess the amount of disease, whereas these days, FibroScan is a simple, non-invasive technique which takes about 10 minutes to assess the amount of damage there is in the liver. This means that patients at the same consultation are informed of whether they have significant disease or whether it can be excluded. This is a major development in the field.
The ongoing treatment and management of viral hepatitis is relatively straightforward. With hepatitis C patients, treatment is required, and where the treatment is successful, the patient can often be discharged from the clinic provided that there’s no significant established liver disease.
However, in hepatitis B, because drugs are used to virally suppress the patients to gain control of the virus without eradicating it, the treatment is more long term and the supervision and monitoring are also long term. FibroScan will be used to monitor liver scarring and fibrosis, and whether the treatment has caused a reversal, a major objective of the treatment.
If you would like to make an appointment to see a specialist in viral hepatitis, you can find the ones on the Top Doctors website here.