Hepatitis C News

Using the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases and Infectious Diseases Society of America guidelines, treatment for HCV in the Department of Corrections through telehealth was highly effective with an overall sustained virologic response of 97%, regardless of underlying genotype or direct-acting antivirals regimen used, according to data from Digestive Disease Week.

During this COVID-19 pandemic, many scientists have turned their efforts to find either a treatment or vaccine for the infection or trying to better understand the infection.

For patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a positive anti-hepatitis B core antibody was correlated with cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, according to a study published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

SVR, which has been challenged in regard to its association with clinical outcomes, has been confirmed as a prognosis-altering endpoint in patients with hepatitis C virus, according to findings published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Drug-drug interactions, or DDIs, affect about 40% of patients with hepatitis C virus being treated with direct-acting antivirals, or DAAs, according to a study published in Open Forum Infectious Diseases. Researchers said lower DDI potential among modern DAA regimens is counteracted by changing patient characteristics.

Using data from more than 840,000 health care encounters, researchers estimated that around 90% of people who inject drugs missed opportunities for HIV or hepatitis C virus testing during a recent 8-year period — especially rural males seeking care for skin infections or endocarditis.

An analysis of peer-reviewed articles provided global prevalence estimates of hepatitis C virus in children, according to data from a modelling study.

Implementation of a multifaceted hepatitis C care pathway improved screening and linkage to care rates, especially among baby boomers, or those born between 1945 and 1965.

The “direct-acting antiviral era” for hepatitis C has been a novel step forward in medicine with several regimens providing cure rates of 95% or higher and many available as secondary treatments for patients whose initial treatment failed. With this highly curative option, researchers have focused on evaluating opportunities to use hepatitis-C infected organs to increase the transplant donor pool.

Patients who received a hepatitis C virus-positive donor heart experienced similar posttransplant survival, drug-treated rejection, postoperative dialysis and stroke incidence to patients whose transplant heart was from a HCV-negative donor.