الفهرس 
Hepatitis C VirusOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Chronic hepatitis C infects more than 170 million individuals worldwide, and hepatitis C virus genotype 4 is the cause of 20% of this number. chronic hepatitis C is number one indication for liver transplantation and one of the most common causes of chronic liver disease worldwide. The aim of this study is to study IL-28B gene polymorphism as a pre-treatment predictor of therapy-induced viral clearance in CHC Egyptian patients, as well as studying the potential relation between IL-28B gene polymorphism and other host factors that may influence the response to treatment like age, gender, stage of fibrosis, active bilharzias co-infection, BMI, FBG, ALT levels, as well as HCV RNA load. The study was conducted on one hundred Egyptian patients with CHC infection (HBsAg seronegative and anti-HCV seropositive with detectable HCV-RNA), those patients were randomly selected from outpatient clinic in Internal Medicine Specialized Hospital, Mansoura University, the study started at 1/8/2011 till 25/7/2013. This study is a prospective analytical study and the protocol conforms to the Medical Sciences Ethics Committee of Mansoura Faculty of Medicine and all the included patients have their written informed consent. All the studied patients were submitted to the SOC therapy of PEG INF-α 2a 180 mcg per week or PEG-INF α 2b 1.5 mcg/kg per day in combination with RBV 1000–1200 mg per day for 48 weeks. For subsequent analysis, patients are classified according to response to therapy into two groups: group 1 ‘‘responders’’ includes patients who have shown negative HCV-RNA after 24 weeks following completion of a 48 weeks treatment course….group 2 ‘‘non-responders’’ includes null-responders, breakthrough, and relapsers. Sustained virological response was achieved in 61% of the studied patients. IL-28B polymorphism revealed three variants named CC (28%), CT (545), and TT (18). The best response was achieved in CC genotype (89.3%) followed by CT (57.4%), then TT genotype (27.8%). In conclusion, IL-28B genotyping could provide important and independent information about a patient’s likelihood of achieving a sustained virological response and helping these patients and their doctors to decide whether to initiate therapy or wait until directly acting anti-virals become available and HCV treatment should not be withheld based solely on IL-28B genotype but all other relevant host and viral predictors of response should be taken into consideration.