10. Are there different genotypes of the hepatitis B virus?

I want to highlight, for those of you who want to keep up with the literature, there’s an evolution now of hepatitis B virus genotypes. Let me just summarize to say that this is not something we use in day-in day-out clinical practice. This is new information, this is evolving, and we don’t have clear consensus on all the research yet. In the case of hepatitis C, genotypes are critically important, they help us make major decisions about therapy. But there are some interesting things that are coming out here. There are now seven genotypes that are classified by the letter of the alphabet. The way to remember it is that Northern Americans, the Caucasian US population are A and D and the Asian US population are B and C. These other ones are less common. One association is the B genotype appears to be less active, more slowly progressive than C, maybe because it has an earlier sero-conversion.