Male patients with hepatitis B are more prone to suffer from severe liver disease than women but the reason remains unknown.
Highlights
- Men with Hepatitis B are more likely to be affected with severe liver disease than women but the reason remains unclear.
- Men who are current drinkers had eight times the //risk of developing liver disease and women who currently drink were four times as likely.
- Even when accounting for smoking and alcohol, sex was still a strong, independent indicator of liver disease risk in the hepatitis B patients.
But Jing Sun, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a graduate of Drexel's Dornsife School of Public Health, found no such evidence in her recent study. The best indicator for the severity of liver disease was found to be the patient's sex.
"Currently, there is no therapy that can cure hepatitis B infection. People infected with it have very different clinical outcomes: Some remain without symptoms throughout their lifetimes while others develop severe liver conditions, such as liver cancer, cirrhosis and liver failure. Predicting those who will eventually develop liver disease provides important information for intervention strategies," Sun explained.
Modifiable factors which include lifestyle choices, drinking habits were not associated with the risk of liver disease. Though these factors can be changed, there was no link.
But still, the study found that men with hepatitis B were just over twice as likely to develop severe liver disease as women.
The study collected information from 1,863 men and women from the year 2003. Alcohol intake, smoking habits, beverage and water intake was also taken into account. It also used information from physical examinations, ultrasounds, and blood tests to determine liver disease condition, ranking from "normal" to "severe," which included cirrhosis and liver cancer.
Smoking was also found to increase risk for both men and women. Smoking increased the risk of disease development by 2 times.
But the study found that even when accounting for these different factors, sex was still a strong, independent indicator of liver disease risk in the hepatitis B patients. Men consistently were two times as likely as women to develop cirrhosis or liver cancer.
"Based on the results of animal studies done by other groups, we hypothesize such differences are due to other biological causes (e.g. sex hormones)," Sun said.
And while lifestyle or environmental risks for patients don't seem to explain the difference in liver disease in men and women who have hepatitis B, those factors aren't meaningless, either.
"Of course, even though the lifestyle difference between males and females cannot explain the gender difference, patients infected with hepatitis B should still avoid these risk factors to prevent liver disease progression," Sun concluded.
Reference
- Jing Sun et al., No contribution of lifestyle and environmental exposures to gender discrepancy of liver disease severity in chronic hepatitis b infection: Observations from the Haimen City cohort, PLOS ONE,(2017),https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0175482.
Source-Eurekalert