context occult hepatitis b (ohb), or persistent hbv dna in patients who are hepatitis b surface antigen (hbsag) negative, is a recently recognized entity. in an attempt to summarize the issues, this review presents an overview of the current proposed hypothesis on the clinical relevance and also updates the knowledge on the classification of ohb in different clinical settings. evidence acquisit...

background and objective: although hepatitis b vaccine immunogenicity is high, certain risk factors such as age, tobacco consumption, obesity and genetic background have been associated with low responsiveness to hbv vaccine. we aimed to evaluate the role of occult hepatitis b virus (hbv) infection in non-responder adults to hbv vaccine in a low endemic area for hbv. material and methods : a to...

Volunteer blood donors are screened for hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection by various immunoassay methods in Turkey. The risk of enzyme immunoassay (EIA) negative and positive nucleic acid amplification technology (NAT) samples is not clearly understood yet. The purpose of this study is to screen for such donors in Turkey by a comm...

Occult hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection (i.e., detectable HCV-RNA in the liver or peripheral blood mononuclear cells) in the absence of both serum HCV-RNA and anti-HCV antibodies has not been investigated in hemodialysis patients. In this study, real-time PCR and in situ hybridization was used to test for the presence of genomic and antigenomic HCV-RNA in peripheral blood mononuclear cells of ...