Loading...
For patients with chronic viral hepatitis, clinicians instinctively rely on liver enzyme measurements to estimate disease activity and assess need for liver biopsy or antiviral treatment. Although some guidelines support this practice, we still have relatively little information about disease progression in patients with persistently normal liver enzyme levels.
Researchers in India evaluated 1387 adults with asymptomatic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection to determine the correlation between liver-enzyme elevations and histologic disease. Presumably, most participants had acquired HBV infections during childhood.
Fourteen percent of patients had persistently normal serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels. Regardless of their hepatitis B e …