Loading...
The National Institutes of Health convened a consensus development conference and commissioned a systematic review on the management of patients with hepatitis B. The reviewers identified 16 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of hepatitis B virus (HBV) drug treatments that involved 4431 patients. More than half of study patients experienced adverse events.
The NIH panel determined that the goals of treatment are to prevent cirrhosis, liver failure, hepatocellular carcinoma, and death. No RCTs demonstrated that treatment was associated with beneficial effects on these outcomes. In a small number of trials (1–3 for each outcome; all deemed to be of low-to-moderate quality), some positive effects were reported for surrogate clinical outcomes, …