Hepatitis medications

Anti-hepatitis medications are a group of antiviral agents used to treat viral hepatitis, which is the inflammation of the liver caused by some sort of virus that targets and damages liver cells.

Now, viral hepatitis can be acute or chronic.

Acute hepatitis lasts for six months or less, and usually resolves on its own without any antiviral treatment.

Chronic hepatitis lasts for more than six months, sometimes even for decades.

Anti-hepatitis medications are mainly used to treat chronic hepatitis and the two main viruses are hepatitis B virus, or HBV, and hepatitis C virus, or HCV.

Alright, so, HCV is a single stranded RNA virus.

What this means is that HCV inject its RNA into the host’s cell and it can immediately use its host’s ribosomes and translate the proteins needed to make more viruses, like capsomere proteins and enzymes like RNA-dependent RNA polymerase.

This RNA-dependent RNA polymerase uses the viral RNA as a template, and uses the hepatocyte’s nucleotides to transcribe a complementary strand of RNA, which is then used to form new baby viruses!

HBV on the other hand is a double stranded DNA virus.

Once the DNA gets injected into a new cell, it enters the cell’s nucleus and is replicated by the host cell’s machinery.

It’s also transcribed into several messenger RNAs and a pregenomic RNA, and then the messenger RNAs are used to make capsomere proteins and enzymes like DNA polymerase.

DNA polymerase uses the pregenomic RNA to synthesize new copies of the viral DNA, which is combined with the capsomere proteins to assemble new viruses.

With each type of virus, whether it’s RNA or DNA, it’s turning your own cells into virus making factories and pumping out new viruses.

This process strains, damages and potentially kills the infected hepatocytes.

When these liver cells die, the liver gets inflamed and that’s called hepatitis.

The anti-hepatitis medications can be divided into two groups based on their mechanism of action; nucleoside or nucleotide analogues and interferons.

Let’s start with the nucleoside and nucleotide analogues. This group includes nucleoside analogues like ribavirin, entecavir and lamivudine; nucleotide analogues like adefovir, tenofovir, and sofosbuvir.