A multicenter study of entecavir vs. tenofovir on prognosis of treatment-naïve chronic hepatitis B in South Korea

Residual risk of HCC during long-term oral nucleos(t)ide analogues (NUCs) in patients with CHB – Is one NUC better than the other?

“…1,3,6 In a recent issue of Journal of Hepatology, Kim and co-workers reported the findings of a retrospective cohort study of 2,897 patients with CHB recruited from 4 academic teaching hospitals in South Korea. 7 The authors compared the 5-year cumulative probabilities of HCC and death or liver transplantation in patients with or without compensated cirrhosis who had received ETV and TDF as the first antiviral agent. With several statistical approaches, including propensity score (PS)-matched and inverse probability of treatment weighting analyses, the authors did not demonstrate any difference in HCC incidence nor in other clinical outcomes.…”

Reply

“…Recent observational studies have attempted to address this with conflicting results, and currently there is no consensus regarding such differences between available therapies. (1,2) We agree with Dr. Li that hepatic steatosis should be separated from non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). We have shown that in contrast to NASH, hepatic steatosis was not associated with worse outcomes in our adjusted analysis.…”

“…We were not able to further stratify our analysis based on the types of antiviral drugs to assess their effects on clinical outcomes independently of disease severity or viral suppression. Recent observational studies have attempted to address this with conflicting results, and currently there is no consensus regarding such differences between available therapies …”

Letter: is tenofovir superior to entecavir for hepatocellular carcinoma prevention in chronic hepatitis B?

“…We identified six cohort studies with large sample sizes which fulfilled our inclusion criteria. [3][4][5][6][7][8] Participants of one study were from Hong Kong, 3 and those of the other four studies were from Korea. 4,[6][7][8] The last cohort study analyzed an international consortium that encompassed 19 centres from six countries or regions (United States, n = 5; China, n = 3; Hong Kong, n = 2; Japan, n = 4;…”

“…All these six retrospective cohort studies composed of treatment-naïve CHB patients treated with either TDF or entecavir monotherapy. [3][4][5][6][7][8] The follow-up duration ranged from 32.0 to 69.9 months. The overall incidence rate of HCC was In conclusion, this meta-analysis revealed that TDF was superior to entecavir monotherapy for HCC prevention in CHB.…”