Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia, Inc.; Wednesday July 8, 8:55 pm EST
The drug is lamivudine, sold under the brand name Epivir by Glaxo Wellcome (quote from Yahoo! UK & Ireland: GLXO.L), which paid for the study.
Reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, the study involved 358 volunteers with hepatitis B, a liver disease that affects more than 300 million people worldwide and can lead to cirrhosis, liver cancer and death.
Among the volunteers, 142 received 25 milligrams of lamivudine daily, while 143 received a daily dose of 100 mg, and the rest took placebo tablets.
When the research team, led by Dr. Ching-Lung Lai of the Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, assessed the amount of liver damage in the volunteers, they found improvement in 56 percent of the patients getting the highest dose, versus 49 percent among people who got 25 mg daily. In contrast, only 25 percent of the placebo recipients got better.
Because liver damage declined and the drug appeared to be safe, they said, "longer-term treatment should be evaluated."
"The findings ... may have a particularly strong impact in Asia, where 75 percent of the approximately 300 million hepatitis B virus carriers in the world live," said Dr. Masao Omata of the University of Tokyo in an editorial in the Journal.
Hepatitis B is often spread by infected body fluids. But in Africa and Asia, where the disease is common, it can also be spread from mother to newborn.
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