Hi everyone, I recently listened to an online talk about chronic hepatitis B, which suggested that
quantitative measurement of surface antigen could be a useful part of an assessment. I had not previously heard of getting a quantitative measurement of the amount of surface antigen present in someone's serum. I am curious if other people have heard about this. If so, is it easy to obtain? And if it is indeed useful, why is it different from getting a quantitative DNA/viral load? (Or maybe this particular webinar was sponsored by a company that is developing this assay - I don't know!) Certainly I would welcome any advances that make it easier to sort my chronic hepatitis B patients into "need to treat" and "keep an eye on them" categories.
Of course, for those coinfected with hiv, we are usually treating their hep B anyway sort of automatically, because most of them are on tenofovir-containing ART. But for the monoinfected chronic hep B folks, I have often found it a bit challenging to properly sort them out.
Welcome thoughts & input!
Thanks, victoria behrman MD