A critique and systematic review of the clinical utility of hepatitis B core-related antigen

Abstract

Background & aims: Hepatitis B core-related antigen (HBcrAg) is a new biomarker for chronic hepatitis B (CHB) whose performance has not been critically or systematically appraised. Herein, we performed a systematic review to determine its clinical utility.

Methods: We evaluated the biological pathway of HBcrAg and performed a systematic review of PubMed for clinical trials, cohort studies, and case-control studies that evaluated the clinical utility of HBcrAg. The effectiveness of HBcrAg in predicting HBV-specific clinical events (e.g. HBeAg seroconversion, phases of CHB, HBsAg loss, treatment response, and relapse after stopping therapy) was examined using receiver-operating characteristic curves. The correlation coefficients of HBcrAg with HBV DNA, quantitative HBsAg (qHBsAg), HBV RNA, and cccDNA were summarised from published studies. Median values were used as estimates.

Results: HBcrAg consists of three precore/core protein products: HBcAg, HBeAg, and a 22 kDa precore protein. HBcrAg assays have been associated with false-positive rates of 9.3% and false-negative rates of between 12-35% for CHB. The new iTACT-HBcrAg is more sensitive but does not reduce the false-positive rate. A PubMed search found 248 papers on HBcrAg, of which 59 were suitable for analysis. The clinical performance of HBcrAg was evaluated using AUROC analyses, with median AUROCs of 0.860 for HBeAg seroconversion, 0.867 for predicting HBeAg(-) hepatitis, 0.645 for HBsAg loss, 0.757 for treatment response, and 0.688 for relapse after stopping therapy. The median correlation coefficient (r) was 0.630 with HBV DNA, 0.414 with qHBsAg, 0.619 with HBV RNA and 0.550 with cccDNA. Correlation decreased during antiviral therapy, but combined biomarkers improved performance.

Conclusions: HBcrAg has a mixed performance and has a poor correlation with HBsAg loss and antiviral therapy, hence HBcrAg results should be interpreted with caution.

Impact and implications: Hepatitis B core-related antigen (HBcrAg) has been used to assess management of patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) without a systematic and critical Sreview of its performance. Our finding that HBcrAg had a false-positive rate of 9% and a false-negative rate of 12-35% raises concerns, although larger studies are needed for validation. A systematic review showed that the performance of HBcrAg was variable depending on the CHB endpoint; it was excellent at predicting HBeAg seroconversion and HBeAg-negative chronic hepatitis (vs. chronic infection), which should be its main use, but it was poor for relapse after stopping antiviral therapy and for HBsAg loss. HBcrAg results should be interpreted with considerable caution, particularly by physicians, researchers, guideline committees and agencies that approve diagnostic tests.

Keywords: Biomarker; HBV RNA; HBeAg seroconversion; HBsAg loss; antiviral therapy; cccDNA; correlation; prediction; treatment response.