Study of prediction of response to Pegylated Interferon plus ribavirin in hepatitis C patients by IL28B gene variation and its relation to other different predictors

Abstract

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a major cause of chronic liver disease (Berg T et al., 2003). Worldwide, hepatitis C is the cause of 27% of cirrhosis cases and 25% of hepatocellular carcinoma (Alter MJ, 2007). The treatment of HCV has many side effects, costs a lot and not all the patients respond to it. The ability to predict treatment outcomes becomes an important consideration in the management of chronic HCV infection and the approach to treatment has become more individualized in order to achieve optimal tolerability, duration of therapy, and virologic response (Hadziyannis SJ et al., 2004). Many studies were done to find predictors of treatment response to INF and ribavirin in HCV patients to find the patients, mostly will respond to treatment or to change its duration. Thus decreasing the side effects, the costs of medications and choosing patients to use the triple therapy with direct acting antiviral drugs (Butti M, 2002). The aim of our study is to find if there is a relation between IL28B gene single nucleotide polymorphism and the response to treatment of HCV by a combination of PEG- Interferon and ribavirin. Also, to find if IL28B is not inferior in predicting the response to treatment of HCV than other predictors like age, sex, liver enzymes, liver biopsy and degree of steatosis, body mass in