Association between HBV Infection and the Prevalence of Coronary Artery Disease in the US Population

AIMS: This study aims to investigate the association between HBV infection and coronary artery disease (CAD) prevalence in the US population. A nomogram was proposed to predict CAD based on HBV infection. METHODS: 25,749 individuals were collected from the 2001-2014 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Participants with hepatitis B core antibody seropositivity were identified with HBV infection, including current and previous HBV infection status. We used adjusted logistic regression and performed sensitivity analysis to investigate the association between HBV infection and the prevalence of CAD. The effect size was evaluated by odds ratio (OR) with a 95% confidence interval (CI). Then, we created a nomogram to predict coronary artery disease. Additionally, we applied the Cox regression model to assess the association between HBV infection and all-cause mortality in those with baseline CAD. RESULTS: 1790 (6.95%) individuals were with HBV infection. In the adjusted model, individuals with HBV showed a decreased CAD risk than those without (OR, 0.81; 95% CI, 0.67-0.98). Consistently, reduced risk in self-reported angina (OR, 0.72; 95% CI, 0.52-0.98) and coronary heart disease (OR, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.58-0.98) was observed in the hepatitis B core antibody seropositivity group. The subgroup analysis showed a consistent trend in the subgroups of age (<45 or ≥45), gender (male or female), hypertension (no or yes), and diabetes (no or yes). In the testing set, the proposed predictive model showed good performance with an area under the curve of 0.85 (95% CI, 0.83-0.86). There was no significant association between HBV infection and all-cause mortality in CAD patients (adjusted P = 0.202). CONCLUSION: Our study suggests that HBV infection was associated with lower CAD risk. The proposed nomogram showed good performance in predicting CAD. However, no significant association was observed between HBV and all-cause mortality in CAD patients.