Nazir Ibrahim, Mohammed Eyad Yaseen AlSabbagh, Mohammed Qintar, Mouhanad Samra, Yasser Shahrour

2010

Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews

5

John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Hepatitis B is a disease of the liver caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV), which has a partially double‐stranded circular DNA (Carman 1992). HBV infection causes a significant worldwide health problem. Approximately one third of the world population has serological evidence of past or present infection by HBV (EASL 2009). An estimated 350 million are chronically infected with HBV (Lavanchy 2004), and 600,000 persons die each year because of acute or chronic hepatitis B (WHO 2008). About 25% of the chronically infected adults die from either liver cirrhosis or cancer caused by the chronic infection. The virus is transmitted through contact with the blood or other body fluids of an infected person. The HBV is 50 to 100 times more infectious than human immunodeficiency virus (WHO 2008). The diagnosis of chronic HBV infection is based on persistence of HBsAg in plasma for more than six months; plasma IgG anti‐HBc is positive, while …