St. Louis, United States, December 4: A new research suggests that maintenance therapy does not help the patients with advanced chronic hepatitis C who do not respond to it the very first time.
Study author Dr. Adrian Di Bisceglie, chief of hepatologydefine and co-director of the Liver Center at Saint Louis University, said, "This course of treatment had been adopted by a number of doctors in the U.S. and in other countries, though it had yet to be proven to work. That practice should be stopped, based on the results of this trial. There is no rationale for using maintenance therapy. The treatment is clearly ineffective."
The researchers conducted the study upon 1050 patients with chronic hepatitis C. They were divided into two groups. Low doses of peginterferon were given to one group for three and half years to restrain the hepatitis C virus and progression of liver disease. The other group was control group.
The result of the study was surprising. After four years of research, the researchers found that 30 percent patients in both the groups (treatment group and control group) had either developed the lever failure, liver cancerdefine or had died and the patients who were not suffering from severe liver diseases developed it.
De Bisceglie said, “Hepatitis patients in these circumstances got very ill over the course of four years, surprisingly so. The lesson we learned is that once chronic hepatitis C gets to the stage of advanced fibrosisdefine, patients can decline rapidly."
Hepatitis C is a blood-borne infectious disease that is caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV), and affects the liver. Hepatitis C infects nearly 200 million people worldwide and four million in the United States. There are about 35,000 to 185,000 new cases of HCV reported in a year and about 10,000-20,000 deaths are caused every year due to HCV in the United States. Hepatitis C is the leading cause of liver transplant in the United States.
The study was published in the Dec. 4 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
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