Kidney Function And Bone Loss Improves While Switching To TAF In Hepatitis B Patients

Switching from the former tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) to the new tenofovir alafenamide (TAF) improves kidney function biomarkers and recovery of bone loss in patients with hepatitis V virus, researchers announced at the International Liver Congress last week in Amsterdam.

Due to its excellent efficacy and high-level safety profile, updated European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) hepatitis B clinical practice guidelines released at the conference now recommend TAF as a new treatment option, especially for people at higher risk for bone or kidney problems.

"Instead of waiting for patients to get a renal disease or bone disease, we should be more pre-emptive in trying to minimize these comorbidities," Kosh Agarwal, one of the authors of the study from King’s College Hospital in London said at the hepatitis B guidelines presentation. "We are seeing changes in bone turnover and renal markers that are not quite translating to clinical endpoints yet, but we have the data on co-infection, and we understand that the efficacy [of TAF] is strong, so we should be thinking about the prevention of comorbidities for what is still a long-term therapy for a majority of patients."