Background
Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) is one of causes of chronic renal disease, mainly through deposition of immune complexes in the kidney [
1]. In the area with high hepatitis B virus (HBV) prevalence, such as many within Asia-Pacific region, HBV-related membranous nephropathy and mesangiocapillary glomerulonephritis are closely correlated with end-stage renal diseases and renal replacement therapy [
2,
3]. However, the mechanism of these renal dysfunctions has not been fully elucidated. The potential confounding factors include elder age, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) co-infection, end-stage liver diseases, and nephrotoxic drugs [
4].
HBV induced kidney diseases usually improved with inhibition of viral replication by anti-HBV agents [
5]. Well accepted guidelines [
6‐
8] for the management of HBV infection have been established in recent years. Therapeutic approaches for CHB consist of administration of interferon-α (IFN-α) or nucleos(t)ide analogues (NUCs). Five NUCs are currently available, including two nucleotide (adefovir [ADV] and tenofovir [TDF]) and three nucleoside (lamivudine [LAM], telbivudine [LdT], and entecavir [ETV]). Renal excretion with unchanged drugs is the primary route of elimination of NUCs [
9]. Thus, all NUCs exist dose-dependent kidney toxicities by various mechanisms [
10]. ADV treatment has been previously revealed to be associated with the impairment of renal function [
11‐
13]. Decrease in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) was also found in TDF and ETV-treated patients [
14]. In contrast, long-term LdT therapy was closely related to sustained improvement of renal function, particularly among patients with high risk of renal dysfunction, such as decompensated cirrhosis [
15] and combination therapy with ADV [
16]. However, controversy remains as to safety profile with findings either an increase or a decrease in eGFR during long-term and various classes of antiviral agents in real-life study. Furthermore, few studies focus on the safe renal profile of IFN-α, especially pegylated interferon α-2a (PEG-IFN-α-2a) which was recommended as first-line antiviral drugs by National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. Hence, the aim of this retrospective study was to assess the renal function and antiviral efficacy under PEG-IFN-α-2a and/or NUCs therapy in chronic hepatitis B. Known risk factors were also took into account to analyze the predictors for significant eGFR change.
Methods
Study design
We screened an integrated database which included 678 consecutive patients with chronic HBV infection who received PEG-IFN-α-2a (180 μg, subcutaneous injection weekly), ADV (10 mg, orally once daily), LdT (600 mg, orally once daily), ETV (0.5 mg, orally once daily) or combination of PEG-IFN-α-2a and ETV between December 2005 and March 2013 at a single unit in Center for Infectious Diseases, Tangdu Hospital. The enrolled patients met the following criteria: Diagnoses of CHB according to the standard of the Chinese National Program for Prevention and Treatment of Viral Hepatitis; absence of other hepatitis virus or HIV co-infection; absence of concurrently afflicted by decompensated liver cirrhosis (including ascites, hepatic encephalopathy, varicealbleeding, spontaneous bacterial peritonitis), liver failure, or hepatocellular carcinoma; absence of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, immunocompromised diseases, autoimmune diseases, solid cancer or leukemia. All patients included in this cohort underwent a follow-up evaluation every 12 weeks for a total of 48 weeks. Virological and biochemical assessments were performed as routine examination at every visit. The study protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of Tangdu Hospital on May 2015 (Approval No. TDLL-201505-013). The data were collected on July and August, 2015, and we had access to information that could identify individual enrolled subjects during and after data collection.
Virological and biochemical assessment
Serum HBV DNA was quantified by real-time polymerase chain reaction kit (PG Co Ltd, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China) with detection limit threshold of 2 log10 copies/mL. HBsAg, HBeAg, and anti-HBe was quantified using the ARCHITECT HBsAg, HBeAg, and anti-HBe reagent kit (Abbott GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden, Germany), respectively. Serum biochemical assessments (including alanine aminotransferase [ALT], aspartate aminotransferase [AST], bilirubin, albumin, blood urea nitrogen [BUN], and serum creatinine [Cr]) were measured using an automatic analyzer (Hitachi 7170A, Hitachi Ltd, Tokyo, Japan) in Department of Clinical Laboratory Medicine of Tangdu Hospital.
Evaluation of renal function
The eGFR was estimated by the following formulas based on Cr. The Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration (CKD-EPI) calculation for eGFR (mL/min/1.73 m
2) = 141 × min(Cr/κ, 1)
α × max (Cr/κ, 1)
-1.209 × 0.993
Age × 1.018 (if female). κ is 0.7 for female and 0.9 for male. α is −0.329 for male and −0.411 for male [
17]. The Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) calculation for eGFR (mL/min/1.73 m
2) = 186 × Cr
-1.154 × Age
-0.203 × 0.742 (if female) [
18].
Statistical analysis
The Chi-squared-test, One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), or Kruskal-Wallis test was used to assess the differences in demographic and clinical variables among groups. All continuous variables were tested by repeated measures ANOVA. To evaluate the association between several variables and eGFR changes over time, a linear mixed effects model for repeated measures was used by SAS 9.4 with MIXED procedure. The model considered the baseline age (in years), sex, HBV DNA, ALT, AST, BUN, treatment group, time and group-by-time interaction as fixed effects and incorporated random effects for individual subjects. All P values are 2-sided, and the type I error was set as 5%.
Discussion
HBV replication was directly associated with chronic pathological injury in kidney since HBV DNA could be detected in renal tubular cells of HBV related glomerulonephritis [
23]. Thus, chronic hepatitis B increased the risk of end-stage renal diseases [
24]. The current study was designed to assess renal function of CHB patients who were treated with PEG-IFN-α-2a or NUCs. A novel and important finding was that eGFR improved significantly in patients with PEG-IFN-α-2a therapy over 48 weeks. While LdT treatment was known to reveal the renal protective effect, ADV therapy showed a strong nephrotoxicity based on the eGFR decrease using the linear mixed effects model for repeated measure. The eGFR remained stable in patients with ETV treatment. Age and BUN were notable negative predictive factors for eGFR changes.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the effect of renal function with pegylated interferon therapy for HBV monoinfection. Remarkable elevations in eGFR were observed in both treatment-naïve and ETV-experienced CHB patients who received PEG-IFN-α-2a monotherapy. Interestingly, linear mixed effects model for repeated measures in the individual variations of eGFR also indicated the renoprotective function in PEG-IFN-α-2a-treated patients. Our results were in line with a previous study showing an increase in eGFR for patients with hepatitis B/D virus co-infection who received 48-week PEG-IFN-α-2a therapy [
13]. The elevation of eGFR in LdT-treated patients was also consistent with several previous studies [
15,
16,
20]. Moreover, the improvement of renal function in LdT based therapy was not remarkably associated with inhibition of HBV replication [
15,
16], and our study in PEG-IFN-α-2a based treatment demonstrated a similar trend because the baseline HBV DNA levels in all of the ETV-experienced patients were under the limitation of detection from baseline to 48 weeks of therapy. Furthermore, it is generally elucidated that deposition of immune complexes of HBV antigens and host antibodies mediate most glomerular injuries [
25]. More recent study on HBV-associated membranous nephropathy revealed that the percentage of CD4
+CXCR5
+ follicular T helper (Tfh) cells was negatively correlated with the value of eGFR [
26]. Li et al. [
27] also indicated that circulating CD4
+CXCR5
+ Tfh cells contributed to LdT-induced HBeAg seroconversion. This might indicate that the increase in eGFR was a direct beneficial effect from PEG-IFN-α-2a itself rather than an indirect effect by suppression of viral replication. It was reported that both PEG-IFN-α-2a and LdT demonstrated immnunomodulatory properties to control viral replication by activation of cellular and humoral immunity [
28] and suppression of negative regulators [
29]. Thus, we assumed that the immnunomodulatory role of PEG-IFN-α-2a and LdT may partially contribute to the increase of eGFR. However, the specific mechanisms by which PEG-IFN-α-2a and LdT exert their renoprotective effects were still unclear and remains to be clarified in future studies.
Mederacke et al. [
13] revealed a decrease in eGFR during PEG-IFN-α-2a/ADV combination and ADV monotherapy for hepatitis B/D virus co-infection. We showed that ADV administration was most capable negative predictor for eGFR decrease for HBV monoinfection, consistent with the previous studies in different ethnic origins [
4,
11‐
13,
20]. The nephrptoxicity of ADV was partly due to the inhibition of mitochondrial DNA replication during renal excretion [
30], which leaded to dysfunction of mitochondrion and potentially caused clinical adverse events [
9]. Meanwhile, TDF, which was also a nucleotide analogue as ADV, showed different safety renal profiles in several previous studies. An increase in serum Cr of more than 0.5 mg/dL in fewer than 1% of patients during 3-year TDF therapy [
31], and renal impairment was detected in response to TDF treatment [
4]. Significant elevation of serum Cr was commonly found in both ETV and TDF treatments in another study [
14]. However, TDF was just approved for CHB treatment in China in June, 2014. There was no follow-up data for patients with TDF therapy for analysis in the present study. Previous study indicated similar risk of renal events in CHB patients with TDF or ETV treatment, showing that increase in serum Cr was more frequent with ETV than TDF [
14]. Our results demonstrated minor kidney dysfunction for ETV monotherapy. Further studies on the changes in eGFR in patients with combination therapy of PEG-IFN-α-2a and NUCs should be performed to investigate the predominant renoprotective or impairment effects of anti-HBV agents.
This study has several limitations. This was a retrospective analysis of renal function by evaluation of eGFR, although data were derived from prospective study and all patients were well followed-up during the observational period. The enrolled patients was relatively young with most patients less than 50 years old, and only the baseline eGFR levels in ADV treated patients was low. Sixteen ADV treated patients were in CKD stage 2 or 3 with eGFR less than 90 mL/min/1.73 m
2 at baseline based on MDRD formula. Furthermore, The limited number of enrolled patients and relatively short observational time for 48 weeks may also represent restrictions of our study. Thus, we used a linear mixed effects model for repeated measure to evaluate the individual variations of eGFR. Furthermore, no routine urine tests were performed during the study. Levels of serum Cr and changes of eGFR are late markers of renal impairment [
4], which presumably secondarily after proximal tubular dysfunction. Nucleotide such as TDF and ADV tend to be more harmful to tubular than glomerular cells in both HBV and HIV infection [
9,
32]. HBV infection could also induce subtle urinary abonormalities (e.g. proteinuria andhaematuroa) without obvious eGFR decrease in early stage. Thus, the exact impact of specific tubular toxicity of anti-HBV agents cannot be reliably appreciated.
Acknowledgements
Not applicable.