Hepatitis B Treatment

How is Hepatitis B treated?

There is no treatment or medication available to treat acute Hepatitis B. This short-term infection may come and go in 6 weeks to 6 months. Rest and fluids are usually recommended during this short-term infection period. Your health care provider will help reduce some of the flu-like symptoms that may come on to fight the infection. And you will likely need a followup test to make sure the infection has left your body.

Chronic hepatitis B stays forever with cycles of needing and not needing treatment.

5% of the people with acute Hepatitis B get chronic Hepatitis B that will come and go for a lifetime. There are antiviral medications that can slow the virus's ability to cause liver damage. These medications will help fight infections, reduce inflammation and other complications from the liver problems.

There are as many chronic HBV treatment plans as there are infected individuals.

Because your condition may have to be treated off and on for the rest of your life (with the infection rising for a year, sleeping for a year and then returning again for a year), the doctor will only want to prescribe medication when it’s truly needed. Thus you may not start treatment for years depending on whether or not you are having liver problems at the moment. Otherwise, if you start treatment too early you could have unnecessary side effects to the drugs and you could allow the virus the chance to mutate (change) and become drug-resistant.

Since the liver can regenerate (grow back) itself, even damaged liver can get better

Even people with chronic Hepatitis B with advanced disease can regain much of the health their liver lost through treatment. That’s how good the new drugs are for chronic Hepatitis B.

Liver failure can be treated with a new, transplanted liver.

A last resort for livers on the verge of failure is a transplant. During a transplant, the surgeon removes the damaged liver and replaces it with a healthy one.