Association of Serum Total Cholesterol with Pegylated Interferon-α Treatment in HBeAg-Positive Chronic Hepatitis B Patients

Background Recent studies suggest that serum lipids are associated with pegylated interferon-alpha (PEG-IFN-α) treatment response in chronic hepatitis C patients. However, the role of serum lipids in influencing the outcome of HBV treatment is not well understood. This study aims to investigate the association of serum lipids with the response to interferon-alpha treatment for chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients. Methods We dynamically measured 11 clinical serum lipid parameters of 119 hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg)-positive CHB patients, including 53 patients who achieved sustained response (SR) and 66 patients who achieved non-response (NR) induced by PEG-IFN-α treatment for 48 weeks. Results The dynamic analysis showed that the baseline serum total cholesterol (TCHO) level was higher in the NR group than that in the SR group ( P=0.004). Moreover, the correlation analysis demonstrated a significant positive correlation between TCHO and hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) at baseline ( P=0.009). In addition, CHB patients with high baseline TCHO levels exhibited higher HBV DNA, HBsAg, HBeAg and hepatitis B e antibody (HBeAb) levels during early treatment periods (weeks 0, 4, 12 and 24) than those with the low TCHO levels. Furthermore, the logistic regression analysis identified that baseline serum TCHO was a risk factor for NR achievement (OR=4.94; P=0.047). Conclusions: Our results indicated that serum TCHO was associated with PEG-IFN-α therapeutic response in HBeAg-positive CHB patients which suggested that serum TCHO could be useful as an auxiliary clinical factor to predict poor efficacy of PEG-IFN-α therapy.