▲ Professor Young-Suk Lim is consulting a patient with hepatitis B.

Starting timely treatment is crucial for chronic hepatitis B. However, current health insurance reimbursement for antiviral treatment only applies when liver enzyme levels are significantly elevated or cirrhosis is developed. Using the self-developed liver cancer prediction model, the team led by Professor Young-Suk Lim of the Division of Gastroenterology at Asan Medical Center has shown in a multinational study that hepatitis B patients, even with normal liver enzyme levels and no cirrhosis, still face up to an 8-fold increased liver cancer risk if viral loads in the blood are within the risk range.

The research team studied 6,949 hepatitis B patients in South Korea with normal enzyme levels and without cirrhosis. They found that moderate viral loads (1 million units per milliliter of blood, 6 log10 IU/mL) in the blood showed the highest risk of liver cancer. This finding was subsequently confirmed in a multinational cohort of 7,429 patients from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other regions with similar conditions.

In particular, the research team developed a prediction model incorporating six indicators of liver cancer development – viral load, age, gender, platelet count, liver enzyme levels, and hepatitis B antigen status. The team sought to identify patients who do not meet current treatment standards for hepatitis B but are at high risk of developing liver cancer, and the validation results confirmed high prediction accuracy and clinical utility.

Professor Young-Suk Lim stated, “To effectively treat liver cancer, hepatitis B treatment should be initiated based on viral load levels. Through this, we could potentially prevent 40,000 cases of liver cancer in South Korea over the next 15 years.”

The research findings were recently published in the ‘Annals of Internal Medicine,’ the official journal of the American College of Physicians.