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Abstract
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a major public health problem and a leading cause of chronic liver disease worldwide (Strader et al., 2004). The highest prevalence has been reported from Egypt(Frank et al., 2000; Perz et al., 2006). Genotype-4a constitutes
the majority of infection in Egypt (Nguyen and Keeffe, 2005; Kamal and Nasser, 2008).
The current standard of care for treating patients with chronic hepatitis C virus infection is a combination of Peg-IFN-α and ribavirin for 24 or 48 weeks (Strader et al., 2004).
Several factors are predictive of favourable virological responses
to standard antiviral therapy. Clinical investigations of patients with non-response to IFN-based therapy have focused on various issues to maximize the response to antiviral therapy.
Since anti-HBc seropositivity among patients with chronic HCV infection is not a rare entity (Biyikoglu et al., 2007), several studies investigated the relation between the presence of anti-HBc antibodies and the response to interferon therapy.
The current study aimed to study the relation between the response to interferon-ribavirin combination therapy and the presence of anti-HBc antibodies (IgG) in the studied genotype-4 chronic hepatitis C patients.
The effect of detectable anti hepatitis B core antibodies (anti-HBc) as a negative predictor of response to antiviral therapy has been a controversial by investigators. Many authors reported diminished response to interferon (IFN) therapy in anti-HBc
seropositive CHC patients, while others concluded that the presence of anti-HBc antibodies may not affect the outcome of
interferon therapy.