Quantitation and typing of serum hepatitis C virus RNA in patients with chronic hepatitis C treated with interferon-β

✍ Scribed by Yoshinao Kobayashi; Shozo Watanabe; Masayoshi Konishi; Masato Yokoi; Ryuichi Kakehashi; Masahiko Kaito; Masahiro Kondo; Yuji Hayashi; Takahito Jomori; Shiro Suzuki

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 646 KB
• Volume: 18
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0270-9139
• DOI: 10.1002/hep.1840180606

✦ Synopsis

We quantified serum hepatitis C virus RNA titers and determined hepatltis C virus subtypes in chronic hepatitis C patients treated with interferon$ to investigate relationships among serum ALT response, serum hepatitis C virus titer and hepatitis C virus subtype. Of 146 chronic hepatitis C patients who received interferon-p therapy, 24 patients with sustained serum ALT normalization (complete responders) and 26 patients without serum ALT normalization (nonresponders) were randomly selected. Detection, typing and quantitation of hepatitis C virus were performed by means of the "single-tube" polymerase chain reaction method. Of the 24 complete responders, 21 (87.5%) became negative for hepatitis C virus RNA, whereas 21 (80.8%) of the 26 nonresponders remained positive. Hepatitis C virus infections with types I, 11, 111, IV, I1 + I11 and I11 + IV occurred in 0 (O%), 22 (51.2%), 10 (23.3%), 1

(2.3%), 7 (16.5%) and 3 (7.9%) patients, respectively. The mean pretreatment hepatitis C virus RNA titer of complete responders (0.4 2 2.0 x lo4 CID,,,/ml) was significantly lower than that of nonresponders (3.8 2 4.5 x lo4 CID,,,/ml) (p < 0.01). Regardless of HCV subtype, patients with more than lo4 CIDJml of HCV did not show serum ALT normalization, whereas complete serum ALT response was seen in most cases with less than lo2 CID,,,/ml HCV. These results show that mixed infections with different hepatitis C virus subtypes appear to be more common than previously reported and that the pretreatment serum level of hepatitis C virus RNA is a more important predictor of outcome of interferon therapy than is virus genotype.