Characteristics of bile acid profiles in the sera of patients suffered from hepatitis B-related liver disease

Viral hepatitis B is an infectious disease mainly caused by hepatitis B virus (HBV) and causes a relatively high morbidity in China. If acute hepatitis B is not diagnosed and treated in time, it gradually turns into chronic hepatitis B (CHB), while CHB further triggers multi-organ damage. The CHB mainly targets liver and the suffered liver develops to serious diseases such as cirrhosis, liver cancer and liver failure. In clinical practice, predicting the development direction of CHB and classifying the types of hepatitis B-related liver disease (HBLD) are important issues to guide therapeutical approaches. At present, the enzymes involved in liver metabolism are often taken as the biomarkers of liver diseases in clinical diagnosis. These traditional biomarkers are sensitive to discriminate the functions from health and disease liver, nevertheless, they are not competent for prediction and classification of HBLDs. Bile acids are a series of metabolites that are generated, secreted and processed in liver, while they are not only the typical sights of liver functions but also are likely to form different panels as liver disease discriminators. Given the fact that there are few studies on the correlation between bile acid profiles and HBLD, we initiated this study to look for characteristic of bile acid profiles in the sera of patients suffered from HBLDs and the possible bile acid panels serving for clinical applications.