Study Suggests Cure for Hepatitis C

MONDAY, May 21 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers are reporting a potential "cure" for hepatitis C, a blood-borne viral infection that's the leading cause of cirrhosis, liver cancer and the need for liver transplants in the United States.

Use of the drug peginterferon, either alone or in combination with the drug ribavirin, reduced levels of the virus to undetectable levels for up to seven years, the researchers said.

"This paper strongly suggests, for the first time, that hepatitis C is a curable disease," said lead researcher Dr. Mitchell Shiffman, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine and chief of hepatology and medical director of the school's Liver Transplant Program. "After treatment, 99.6 percent of the patients remained virus undetectable for over five years," he added.

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In the study, 997 patients with hepatitis C or with both hepatitis C and HIV were treated with either Pegasys (peginterferon alfa-2a) alone or in tandem with ribavirin. Shiffman's team then monitored blood levels of hepatitis C once a year for an average of 4.1 years, and as long as seven years.

The researchers found that 99 percent of patients with hepatitis C who were treated successfully with peginterferon alone, or in combination with ribavirin, had no detectable virus up to seven years later.

"This is the first long-term study that confirms what we believed for many years that these individuals are truly cured of hepatitis C," Shiffman said.

The remaining eight patients tested positive for hepatitis C at an average of two years after treatment. There was no pattern to the patients as far as age, gender or hepatitis C genotype. It isn't known whether these patients had a relapse or were re-infected with the virus, the researchers noted.

The findings were to be presented Monday at the 38th annual Digestive Disease Week conference, in Washington, D.C.

Hepatitis C is a blood-borne infectious disease of the liver and is one of the most important causes of chronic liver disease in the United States. An estimated 4.1 million Americans have been infected with hepatitis C, and 3.2 million are chronically infected. The number of new infections each year declined from an average of 240,000 in the 1980s to about 26,000 in 2004, the latest year for which statistics are available. The number of hepatitis C-related deaths could increase to 38,000 a year by the year 2010, surpassing annual HIV/AIDS deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.