New research from Mass General Brigham health care system discovers statin therapy meant for lowering cholesterol significantly reduces the risk of liver cancer from Hepatitis B. This finding is supported by data from more than 200 million patients.
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Sounds interesting! The relative risk is not huge in the statin treatment, but it could be something to follow up on with more studies!
Thomas
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Yes! I am hopeful that in this age of increasing compute for artificial intelligence, researchers will discover more meaningful patterns of data that will lead to improvement in HBV patient outcomes and possibly a functional cure.
For those living with HBV-related fibrosis/cirrhosis and have high cholesterol levels, the risk-to-benefit ratio for statin therapy (specifically with pitavastatin) seems low enough to consider starting the therapy slowly using the lowest allowable dosage with close physician-monitoring of ALT / AST, of course.
Here is another Nature Communications journal article discussing how statins prevent cancer development in chronic inflammation by blocking IL-33 expression:
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Hi @mediastudent,
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. It is interesting and merits followup.
However, a brief reading of this raises 3 concerns in my eyes. First, they don’t seem to understand HCC etiology very well as they claim only 10-30% of HCC is caused by HBV, when the accepted numbers from a myriad of studies is around 50%. Second, they do not appear to have done analysis of the type of HBV infection in their human analyses (HBeAg+, HBeAg-, etc). Hepatitis B is such a complex disease that this seems to be an omission in my eyes. Third, mice are not a very good model for HBV-induced carcinogenesis. It’s about the best model we have, but there are a lot of caveats with the mouse work they did, so I would be cautious about extending those mechanistic studies to humans without a lot more work with humans and human tissues–a simple correlation of human HCC with mouse data is tantalizing but not definitive.
I did not have time to read this article in detail so I may have missed something.
John.
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