Dinesha TR, Boobalan J, Sivamalar S, Subashini D, Solomon SS, Murugavel KG, Balakrishnan P, Smith DM, Saravanan S. Occult HBV infection in HIV-infected adults and evaluation of pooled NAT for HBV.
J Viral Hepat 2018;
25:718-723. [PMID:
29316078 PMCID:
PMC5980682 DOI:
10.1111/jvh.12858]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 15] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/17/2017] [Accepted: 12/07/2017] [Indexed: 12/31/2022]
Abstract
The study aimed to determine the prevalence of occult hepatitis B virus infection among HIV-infected persons and to evaluate the use of a pooling strategy to detect occult HBV infection in the setting of HIV infection. Five hundred and two HIV-positive individuals were tested for HBV, occult HBV and hepatitis C and D with serologic and nucleic acid testing (NAT). We also evaluated a pooled NAT strategy for screening occult HBV infection among the HIV-positive individuals. The prevalence of HBV infection among HIV-positive individuals was 32 (6.4%), and occult HBV prevalence was 10%. The pooling HBV NAT had a sensitivity of 66.7% and specificity of 100%, compared to HBV DNA NAT of individual samples. In conclusion, this study found a high prevalence of occult HBV infection among our HIV-infected population. We also demonstrated that pooled HBV NAT is highly specific, moderately sensitive and cost-effective. As conventional HBV viral load assays are expensive in resource-limited settings such as India, pooled HBV DNA NAT might be a good way for detecting occult HBV infection and will reduce HBV-associated complications.
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