Introduction to Viral Hepatitis

00:01 Welcome.

00:02 With this talk, we're going to cover all of the viral hepatitis entities that you need to be concerned with in the human population.

00:09 So all the way from viral hepatitis A to E.

00:14 As the name indicates, viral hepatitis is inflammation of the liver due to viral infections.

00:22 Looking at the epidemiology, we're going to kind of run through each of these, I'll give you a broad overview in the next slide.

00:28 And then we'll go through A, B, C, D, E.

00:32 So all of the viral infections in the liver have various modes of transmission, and we'll cover these each in turn.

00:41 They can vary from completely asymptomatic infections to fulminant liver failure.

00:48 The pathology is really important to understand because it's secondary to the immune response.

00:52 It's not, in most cases, the virus killing hepatocytes.

00:57 But it's the normal immune system responding to virally infected hepatocytes and that's what causes the damage.

01:05 So 90% of mortality occurs due to hepatitis B, and C.

01:11 A, we're gonna see in a moment, it is really fairly benign.

01:14 And it's very unusual for that to cause any significant pathology.

01:18 Similarly, D requires B, as we'll see, it is not a major source of mortality and E is really kind of a minor entity unless you're pregnant or immunocompromised.

01:29 So most of the disease that we're gonna see from viral hepatitis B, or C.

01:35 It's important to understand too that even as the disease is caused by the immune response, if you don't have an immune response, you and the virus can live happily ever after together, in matrimony.

01:50 So patients can be chronic carriers of virus if they don't elicit an immune response.

01:56 When there is inflammation, when there is ongoing hepatocyte damage, all of these can progress to cirrhosis, and also there's increased risk for hepatocellular carcinoma.