4
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Hepatitis C: the clinical spectrum of the disease.

      1
      Journal of hepatology
      Elsevier BV

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The hepatitis C virus (HCV) infects nearly 170 million people worldwide and is responsible for approximately 20% of cases of acute hepatitis and 70% of cases of chronic hepatitis. Acute hepatitis is icteric in only 20% of patients and is rarely severe. Eighty-five percent of infected patients develop chronic infection which is generally asymptomatic, resulting in most cases in fortuitous diagnosis, which may be made at a late stage. Twenty-five percent of the HCV chronic carriers have persistently normal serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels despite having detectable HCV RNA in serum; 75% have elevated ALT levels. The former patients usually have mild histologic lesions, probably with a good long-term prognosis. In the latter patients, a liver biopsy is the most accurate way to distinguish patients with mild chronic hepatitis from those with moderate or severe chronic hepatitis. While most patients with mild chronic hepatitis have a slowly progressive liver disease, the patients with moderate or severe chronic hepatitis may develop cirrhosis within a few years. In patients with HCV-related cirrhosis, the incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma is 2-5% per year. At presently, HCV-related end-stage cirrhosis is the first cause of liver transplantation.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          J. Hepatol.
          Journal of hepatology
          Elsevier BV
          0168-8278
          0168-8278
          1999
          : 31 Suppl 1
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Centre de Recherche Claude Bernard sur les Hépatites Virales and INSERM U-481, Hôpital Beaujon, Clichy, France. marcellin@bichat.inserm.fr
          Article
          S0168-8278(99)80368-7
          10.1016/s0168-8278(99)80368-7
          10622554
          b00d427e-4745-4d91-ad06-363ab57ea487
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article