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About the education tab | All about the liver and liver disease | Liver diseases | Education | Hepatitis B in Children
Hepatitis B in Children
The hepatitis B Virus (HBV) causes hepatitis, which can have different signs and symptoms: there may be no signs of illness at all;
there may be yellow colour of the skin (called jaundice), tiredness, flu?like symptoms, loss of appetite, vomiting and abdominal pain;
very rarely the liver may fail to function altogether in what is called acute or "fulminant" liver failure.
The severity of hepatitis is closely linked to the age when infection occurs, very young children usually showing no symptoms, older children and adults having an obvious hepatitis. Patients with obvious hepatitis are likely to have a relatively short acute illness, to clear the infection and to acquire a lifelong protection against the virus. Those with no symptoms have a higher risk of not being able to clear the infection. If the virus is still present after 6 months such patients are described as chronic carriers. Of those patients who develop chronic hepatitis, 10% will develop severe scarring of the liver (called cirrhosis), which in a proportion of them will result in liver cancer, usually in middle age. Males are more likely to develop these complications than females. These complications rarely occur in childhood.
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