Abstract
Background: This study was aimed to precisely estimate the prevalence of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) and anti-hepatitis C virus antibody (anti-HCV) stratified by sex and birth year in Japan.
Methods: Three large-scaled cohorts: first-time blood donors, periodic health check-up, and comprehensive health check-up with lifestyle education (Ningen dock) were used for pooled prevalence of HBsAg and anti-HCV using meta-regression.
Results: Trends of birth year-specific prevalence of HBsAg and anti-HCV among the three cohorts were similar to one another, while birth year-specific pooled prevalence of HBsAg peaked in the 1941–1950 birth cohort. Prevalence of anti-HCV showed a decreasing trend by birth year.
Conclusion: We could estimate the pooled prevalence of HBsAg and anti-HCV based on nationwide data. The results can be used as reference data for various countermeasures for hepatitis eradication.
© 2019 Tomoyuki Akita et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
