Quantification of Human Telomerase mRNA Level as a Prognostic Marker in Egyptian Patients with Chronic Viral Hepatitis C

Abstract

Hepatitis C is the most pressing public health challenge in Egypt where hepatitis C Virus (HCV) prevalence is the highest in the world. The success of antiviral treatment in patients with chronic HCV (CHC) depends on factors related to the virus and host. The earlier work with telomerase showed that expression of the human telomerase reverse transcriptase mRNA (hTERT) was increased in hepatocyte cultures after overexpression of HCV core protein as compared to normal human liver and uninfected cells. The aim of the present study is to evaluate hTERT as an early prognostic factor for non-fibrotic CHC patients schedule for 24 weeks treatment with pegylated interferon and ribavirin (Peg-IFN/RBV) and the correlation between hTERT follow-up with patients host factors. The study was conducted on 50 chronic non-fibrotic HCV newly diagnosed and recruited from Ain Shams University hospitals. All patients (37 males/13 females) were aged 30 years or older; they were seropositive for HCV antibodies, with detectable HCV RNA; seronegative for other viruses; and free of any other liver or metabolic disease at enrollment. They have received antivira