Agree with you there, John. We need to be careful with all medication even herbal.
It could be damaging our liver. I was taking black cohosh for menopausal symptoms, until I found out it wasn’t good for the liver.
And, isn’t NSAIDs, anti inflammatory pain killers, may be damaging our liver, if taken regularly? @ThomasTu @
Some say paracetamol in our group but I’ve only known anti inflammatory drugs as bad for liver disease.
Well done. It wouldn’t have been easy changing your lifestyle.
Welcome to our amazing group.
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Dear @Caraline,
The biggest issue with most NSAIDs is gastric as chronic use can cause ulcers. The biggest liver impact of the common over-the-counter pain killers is with Tylenol (acetaminophen). It can start having toxic effects on the liver at only twice the OTC dose, and those effects are amplified by alcohol. Therefore, be really careful when using combination cold & flu drugs with Tylenol as many of them have acetaminophen in them. The #1 cause for acute liver failure in the USA is acetaminophen overdose.
John
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Hi. I’m Adedeji Joseph, from Nigeria.
A graduate of Electronics and electrical engineering. I’m 26. I just got diagnosed of HBsAg. I never knew I had it, I was just like let me know my status for fun, and pum, they said I have it.
I hope being here will help me cause right now I have like a million streams of thoughts in my head.
I’m glad to be here.
Hi Adedeji-Joseph
Welcome to the forum where people like you and experts share for the good of each other.
Feel free to bring out your disturbing thoughts and experience so that you can be enriched
Kinoti
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Welcome to the community, @Adedeji_Joseph, and thanks for sharing your story. Hope you feel that you are not alone here and that there are people on this forum who share your experience. We’re all in this together :). As @kinoti mentioned, feel free to share your feelings here, as they help others out there going through the same thing as well.
Yours sincerely,
Thomas
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Welcome! This is a very supportive community, and I hope it helps you as you navigate this change in your life. There are many people with similar experiences to help guide you, and there are many scientists and physicians who can help you understand the complexity of Hepatitis B.
I wish you the very best.
John.
Thank you.
My test results shows HBeAg and HBsAg positive. I think this shows I’m highly infectious and the activities of the virus. Any advice on what to do cause I’ve not been able to see a specialist up until now. And my date is still further. I’m really scared. I’ve only been taking livolin which I think is just a supplement. Kindly advise.
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Hi Adedeji_osef
You are right to say positive for Hep BeAg indicates Hepb that is highly infectious and active. It may also show the stage of infection you are in. @Availlant has advised in a different trend that’s it’s always beneficial for anybody positive for Hep b to be put on treatment. I find his reasoning sound.
Kinoti
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Could you please expatiate. Does it in any way show how long I have been infected, cause really, I am hunted by these thought everyday because I don’t know how I landed here. I’m a very cautious person. Enlighten me please.
Dear Adedeji_Joseph,
The primary route of transmission of HBV amongst adults is the sharing of needles with IV drug use or unprotected sex. The HBV virus is also quite stable outside the body so it is possible to get infected vial an open wound as well. However the bulk of infection world wide happens during birth in HBV infected mothers.
Any of these is a possibility in your case and there is no way of knowing with certainty how you got infected or for how long you have been infected.
Here are the things I would like you to focus on:
- Getting infected is not your fault!
- There are good medications you can take to very safely and effectively control your infection so that you can live a long and happy life and have a family and children if you want.
- The sooner you start treatment the better.
With best regards,
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Dear @Adedeji_Joseph,
Yes, I agree with @availlant that it is almost impossible to know when you may have been infected as there are multiple ways it could have happened and the infection can be silent, so you don’t feel any symptoms for a long time. I myself was likely infected when I was a newborn or young child, but didn’t’ find out until my teenage years.
Also, to clarify, while HBeAg-positive is generally correlated with high transmissability, your risk of transmission to others is really only confirmable through testing HBV DNA levels.
Finally, regarding livolin, there doesn’t appear to be any scientific evidence showing that it helps in any way. Herbal supplements such as these are not regulated, so you never know what is really in them.
Hope this helps,
Thomas
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Thanks for these replies, we only can hope for the best then.
I hope to meet a specialist soon.
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Hi @Adedeji_Joseph,
I want to echo both Thomas’ and Andrew’s comments. Although you have an active infection that is likely at high levels (but not certainly until the DNA test is done), there are good medications out there. The most common are tenofovir (it comes in 2 forms, TDF and TAF, most folks start with TDF as it is much cheaper and works well in the large majority of people) and entecavir. Speak with your doctor about which is best in your case. Also, encourage your loved ones to be tested for HBV, and if they are not HBV+, encourage them to be vaccinated.
Although it is natural to wonder how you became infected, it is best now to focus on how best to move forward. With good care, HBV is a quite manageable condition. Also, treatment options are likely to improve relatively soon because the scientific community, including Andrew, Thomas, and me among a great many others, is working really hard to improve therapy even more.
I wish you the very best!
John.
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Thomas, Thank you for creating the forum. This is great place we can share our situation freely. I got HepB when I was about 22 years old in China. That was terrible experience. I will share more detail once I have time. I was hospitalized for about a month and my HbsAg was cleared. I continued to have HbsAg tested in the following few months and HbsAg was always negative, but I still felt terrible weak. Then I stopped having my HbsAg tested. After a couple years, I got really sick again and of course my HbsAg was positive again and since then. I came to the United State more than 25 years ago. I always have my hepB test each year and HBV DNA level was low. About five years ago, my HBV DNA level started escalated and I decided to take Viread and followed by Vimlidy. Now I feel much healthy.
As we all wished, we could clear the hepB by ourselves. I have all my family members tested. My mon, brother and sister all have hepB antibody. My sister-in-law and my brother-in-law have hepB HbsAg positive. My nephews have HbsAg positive also. So I don’t think I got my HbsAg when I was born. Most likely I got it when I was vaccinated with multiple-use needles when I was boy.
A couple months ago, I got Covid-19 and my temperature was as high as 40C for two days. And I refused to take any tylenol or mortrin. After I got HepB 30 years ago, I have never had any fever. I wanted to use this opportunity to clear my hepB. The theory is simple. Fever means immune system fighting hard. I wish that when my immune system fought the Covid-19, it would also kill and clear my hepB. After I recovered from Covid-19, I started having hives on my whole body and had to go to urgent care. Initially I refused to take any allergy medicine again until I could not tolerate. Again the theory is simple. Allergy means my immune system overreacting. I hoped my immune system had cleared my hepB and then overreacted. I will go to have my HbsAg test to see my theory is correct.
I am newly registered although have been following the site in the last month.i was diagnosed in 2017 while trying to donate blood .I had regular follow up until last year. Although ALT and AST kept going up from normal to a little above normal. HBV DNA viral load done a year ago was 250iu/ml, uss done was essentially normal except that I had fatty liver. Since that time I didn’t go for check up.
I noticed a some days ago that I was having pains in the right side of the upper abdomen, ribs and back, although pain isn’t constant.
I am scared that my status has possibly progressed to something worse.
Since the beginning of the year I have been unwell even after treating malaria which is what is currently happening to me.
I have seen a doctor, I have been scheduled for LFT on Monday and abdominal uss on Wednesday.
I am so scared right now because I am still very young, I didn’t know it could progress so fast with the values I had a year ago
I have been watching out for other symptoms like yellowness of the eyes, my urine has always been yellow in colour but I noticed yesterday that it’s deeper. I have always had body itching which comes and goes
Dear @Dan,
Thank you for sharing your story and experiences. It’s great that you felt healthy after starting anti-HBV medication.
Regarding your use of COVID 19 or allergies to fight Hep B, though I can see how it might make sense, the immune system is actually much more complicated than this. The immune system is actually very specific and a reaction against one pathogen usually doesn’t change the reaction against another one. In Hep B in particular, people with chronic HBV infection don’t seem to fare any better or worse against the common cold, or any number of other diseases.
Basically (and happy to be corrected by @ScienceExperts in the immunology field), the immune system of people with chronic infection basically sees the virus as “self”. Just as you don’t (usually) raise an immune response against your own skin, muscles, or brain, the body makes sure not to fight off the Hep B. When you do have an immune response against Hep B, it’s usually only against one part of the virus (e.g. HBeAg), then the virus adapts to HBeAg-negative to avoid it.
The point is, you’re very unlikely to raise the anti-Hep B response by subjecting yourself to fever and hives. You should take your doctor’s advice and take the appropriate medication when necessary. In particular, fever can be deadly if it goes up too high. Please look after yourself!
Dear @Tsbs,
Thank you also for sharing your story here and sorry to hear about your symptoms. That’s a great plan to get your LFTs and US done to find out what’s going on. You’re doing the best you can and you should be proud of that. This is easier said than done, but there’s no benefit from borrowing worry from tomorrow. You have done what you can do now.
For your information as well, there are many other reasons for deeper yellow urine. Probably the most common one is dehydration or not drinking enough water. No need to go crazy with drinking litres and litres, but just ensure that you are drinking when thirsty (your body almost always does a pretty good job at telling you, you just need to listen to it).
There are also other reasons for abdomen pain as well (e.g. as discussed in Upper right quadrant pain, I am feeling a sharp pin pain in my stomach. Why am I feel thay, and Titling feet and pain on the righ shoulder blade), so don’t necessarily take this as a bad sign.
Hope this helps.
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Super important to know anti-HBc on all patients, contacts, family members
Anti-HBc = exposure = cccDNA even if anti-HBs is positive and can be used to talk about exposure and risks and timing
There is no natural immunity to HBV
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