LETTER

Hepatitis C virus clearance and gender

T Stroffolini¹, M Rapicetta² and R Di Stefano³

¹ Department of Gastroenterology, S Giacomo Hospital, Rome, Italy
² Department of Infectious Disease, National Health Institute, Rome, Italy
³ Department of Microbiology, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr T Stroffolini
Department of Gastroenterology, S Giacomo Hospital, Rome, Italy; tommaso.stroffolini@iss.it

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Bakr et al (Gut 2006;55:1183–7), in a large population-based cross-sectional survey on hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in Egypt, found that HCV clearance rates (ie, positive HCV antibodies and negative HCV-RNA test results) were significantly higher in women (44%) compared with men (33.7%, adjusted odds ratio (OR) 1.77).¹ They conclude that these findings provide a strong evidence for a higher HCV clearance rate in women compared with men.

We have obtained different results in three published population-based surveys (not cited by Bakr in the references) performed in Southern Italian towns.^2–4 The overall prevalence of HCV antibody was 324/2561 (12.6%). The prevalence was slightly higher in women (13.7%) than in men (11.3%), a difference which is not statistically significant. None of the anti-HCV-positive patients had previously received antiviral treatment, none reported intravenous drug use, and none of them were HIV-positive. Of those with HCV antibodies (n = . . . [Full text of this article]

Iman Bakr⁴, Mostafa K Mohamed⁴ and Arnaud Fontanet⁵

⁴ Department of Community, Environmental and Occupational Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt
⁵ Emerging Diseases Epidemiology Unit, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr A Fontanet
Emerging Diseases Epidemiology Unit, Intitut Pasteur, 25 rue de Docteur Roux, Paris 75015, France; fontanet@pasteur.fr

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Higher clearance of hepatitis C virus infection in females compared with males

I Bakr, C Rekacewicz, M El Hosseiny, S Ismail, M El Daly, S El-Kafrawy, G Esmat, M A Hamid, M K Mohamed, and A Fontanet
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