14. Are there treatment options for advanced liver damage due to chronic HBV infection?

I think this diagram allows an overall picture of hepatitis B progression. You start with the acute infection and go into the chronic infection. Generally thirty percent of chronically infected individuals will go on to cirrhosis. Cirrhosis leads to liver failure. Patients who get cirrhosis of their liver, twenty-three percent of these patients within five years basically die of liver failure and development of liver cancer. The graph shows that HBV is the sixth leading cause of liver transplantation in the United States at the moment and its rising very rapidly. One of the former problems with liver transplantation in hepatitis B was that the hepatitis B came back in the new liver because the virus settled in other cells in the body and reappeared in the liver. But we’ve overcome that problem now and we can successfully transplant people with hepatitis B liver failure because we have new drugs to suppress the virus in the new liver and the patients with hepatitis B work out extremely well and are much more successful than the hepatitis C patients in terms of liver transplantation.