%0 Journal Article
%T Impact of viral replication inhibition by entecavir on peripheral T lymphocyte subpopulations in chronic hepatitis B patients
%A Jing You
%A Hutcha Sriplung
%A Alan Geater
%A Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong
%A Lin Zhuang
%A Yun-Li Li
%A Hua Lei
%A Jun Liu
%A Hong-Ying Chen
%A Bao-Zhang Tang
%A Jun-Hua Huang
%J BMC Infectious Diseases
%D 2008
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2334-8-123
%X Fifty-five patients received entecavir 0.5 mg/d therapy. Serum HBV DNA load was measured by Real-Time-PCR, and the levels of peripheral T-lymphocyte subpopulations by flow cytometry biweekly, every four weeks and every eight weeks during weeks 1¨C12, 13¨C24 and 24¨C48, respectively. Multilevel modelling was used to analyse the relationship between these variables.Of the 55 patients, all HBeAg positive and with detectable HBV DNA, the majority (81.8%) had serum levels of HBV DNA over 107 copies per milliliter. HBV viral load dropped sharply during the first two weeks. In 28 and 43 patients, the level became undetectable from week 24 and 48, respectively. Using pre-therapy level as the reference, a significant decrease in CD8+ T cells and increase in CD4+ T cells were found from week 12. Both parameters and CD4+/CD8+ ratio steadily improved throughout the 48 weeks. Multilevel analyses showed that the level of decrement of HBV DNA was associated with the increment of T-lymphocyte activities only in the later period (4¨C48 week). After 4 weeks of therapy, for each log10 scale decrement of HBV DNA, the percentage of CD4+ lymphocyte was increased by 0.49 and that of CD8+ decreased by 0.51.T-lymphocyte subpopulations could be restored partially by entecavir treatment in patients with chronic hepatitis B concurrently with reduction of viremia.Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection remains an important health problem with more than 350 million chronically infected people worldwide, and approximately 1 million people die annually from HBV-related disease, such as liver failure, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma [1]. Infection with HBV in adults usually results in a self-limiting, acute hepatitis, which confers protective immunity and causes no further disease. In patients with an acute self-limiting HBV infection, specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses are important for control of the infection [2]. Patients with a chronic HBV infection lack such vigorous, polyclonal, and multis
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2334/8/123