Antiviral Therapy Reduces Risk of Cirrhosis in Noncirrhotic HBV Patients Among 4 Urban Safety-Net Health Systems

INTRODUCTION To evaluate the impact of chronic hepatitis B virus infection (CHB) treatment on risk of cirrhosis, liver-related outcomes, and death among a diverse CHB cohort with a large proportion of African Americans. METHODS Adults with noncirrhotic CHB without human immunodeficiency virus from 2010 to 2018 were retrospectively evaluated across 4 US safety-net health systems. CHB was identified with International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision/Tenth Revision diagnosis coding and confirmatory laboratory data. Propensity-score matching, Kaplan-Meier methods, and adjusted Cox proportional hazards models were used to evaluate impact of CHB treatment on risk of cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), death, and composite of cirrhosis, HCC, or death. RESULTS Among 4,064 CHB patients (51.9% female, 42.0% age