Correlation Between Viral Load of HBV in Chronic Hepatitis B Patients and Precore and Basal Core Promoter Mutations

Background: more than two billion people have been exposed to hepatitis b virus (hbv) worldwide. furthermore, four hundred million of them are infected with chronic hbv infection. the predominant mutation of the precore region involves a g to a change at nucleotide1896, which creates a premature stop codon at codon 28. two mutations of a1762t and g1764a are reported as the most prevalent mutations in the basal core promoter (bcp). objectives: the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between mutations in precore (pc) and basal core promoter regions, and the viral load. patients and methods: fifty serum samples from patients with hepatitis b were used. levels of liver enzymes alanine aminotransferase (alt) and aspartate aminotransferase (ast) were measured at the same time of serological markers of hepatitis b by elisa. hbv-dna was extracted from the sera, and then pcr performed on the hbv-dna extracted with the use of specific primer of gene c. hbv viral load was determined by real-time pcr. the pc/ bcp mutations were determined by applying line probe assay technique. the data were analyzed using spss software, version 20. results: only 82% of the patients were hbeab positive and 76% of the patients had basal core/ precore mutations and mean viral load was 3/7 × 106 ± 9/7 × 105 iu/ml. prevalence of mutations in the precore and basal core promoter regions were 46% and 30%, respectively. conclusions: our data indicated that there is a statistically significant relationship between hbv viral load and mutations in precore region (p < 0.05).