Abstract
Background/Aims Approximately two billion people worldwide have been infected with hepatitis B virus (HBV) and about 350 million live with chronic infection. Over half of all liver cancer cases in the world are attributable to chronic, or persistent, HBV infection. Of US residents chronically infected with HBV, 40% to 70% are foreign-born immigrants, mainly Asian/Pacific Islanders (APIs). Disparity by race exists for APIs which makeup approximately 4% of the U.S population and more than 2% of these races are affected with chronic HBV. The purpose of this study is to estimate the prevalence of HBV in foreign and US born APIs and test the differences in these groups for testing (HBV DNA or HBsAg), testing positive for HBV, alanine aminotranferase (ALT) level and other demographic variables.
Methods Utilization data from Kaiser Permanente, Hawai’i (KPHI) was used. All adults (18 yrs and older) with enrollment for any length of time from 2006 to 2008, with at least one health plan encounter and twelve months of continuous enrollment at any time were included. Persons with HBV diagnosis within six months of first encounter were excluded. We limited the analysis to Asians and Pacific Islanders. Date of birth, race, gender, and country of origin (COO), household income and education were obtained from the Virtual Data Warehouse (VDW) demographic and census tables.
Results and Discussion Among who met the inclusion criteria (N= 191,335), 69,923 were APIs and of these 68% had information on country of origin. We plan to report
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the prevalence of HBV in foreign and US born APIs
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test the difference between the these two groups with respect to testing, testing positive for HBV infection, age, gender, annual income and ALT levels.
