Lowered Serum Triglyceride Levels among Chronic Hepatitis B-Infected Patients in Ghana

Abstract

Dyslipidemia is a common finding in most studies of liver diseases. Little is however known about the effect of the two pathological stages of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) infection – chronicsymptomatic and asymptomatic – on the distribution of serum lipids in CHB infection. We conducted a study on CHB-infected patients attending specialist care at the Gastro-Intestinal (GI) Clinic at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH) during a 7-month period. 64 participants were randomly sampled over the period. On the basis of serological and liver enzyme assays, participants were categorised as chronic asymptomatic, chronic symptomatic and healthy individuals. The relationship between the hosts pathological stage of infection were evaluated with the indices of lipid metabolism – LDL, HDL, triglyceride, and total serum cholesterol using ANOVA. The 64 volunteers recruited in the study were found to consist of 18 patients (28.1%) who were chronic symptomatic, 35 patients (54.7%) who were chronic asymptomatic hepatitis B, and 11 (17.2%) were healthy subjects. Significant overall male dominance was observed among all categories of population enrolled (p=0.0063). Serum triglyceride levels decreased more among the CHB-infected population compared to the healthy individuals (p=0.0010) with value lowest among the chronic symptomatic population. Basal serum cholesterol, HDL, and LDL were unaffected by the disease. This work reveals that serum triglyceride is significantly lowered in CHB infection and that the extent of this decrease in host is independent of the pathological stage of the infection.

Keywords: chronic hepatitis B, lipid metabolism, triglyceride, chronic symptomatic