You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Letter
Interferon-β plus ribavirin for patients with hepatitis C virus genotype 1: a randomised pilot trial
  1. M Enomoto1,
  2. A Tamori1,
  3. N Kawada1,
  4. H Jomura1,
  5. S Nishiguchi2,
  6. T Saibara3,
  7. S Onishi3,
  8. S Mochida4,
  9. K Fujiwara4
  1. 1Department of Hepatology, Osaka City University Medical School, Osaka, Japan
  2. 2Department of Internal Medicine, Hyogo College of Medicine, Nishinomiya, Japan
  3. 3Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Kochi Medical School, Kochi, Japan
  4. 4Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Internal Medicine, Saitama Medical School, Saitama, Japan
  1. Correspondence to:
    Dr S Nishiguchi
    Division of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Diseases, Department of Internal Medicine, Hyogo College of Medicine, 1-1 Mukogawa, Nishinomiya, Hyogo 663-8501, Japan; nishiguc{at}hyo-med.ac.jp

https://doi.org/10.1136/gut.2005.081935

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    The rate of sustained eradication of hepatitis C virus (HCV) in response to a combination of interferon-α and ribavirin remains unsatisfactory in patients with genotype 1 infection.1 No effective alternative treatment is currently available for non-responders. Interferon-β is also a type I interferon commonly used to treat chronic HCV infection in Japan. A previous study showed that a 24 week course of therapy with interferon-β plus ribavirin resulted in sustained loss of HCV in three of nine patients with chronic hepatitis C.2 However, the efficacy and safety of interferon-β combined with ribavirin has yet to be fully evaluated.

    We report the results of a randomised pilot trial comparing interferon-β plus ribavirin with interferon-α plus ribavirin in patients with HCV genotype 1 who poorly responded to interferon-α plus ribavirin. A total of 28 patients with HCV genotype 1 were given 6 MU of recombinant interferon-α2b (Schering-Plough, Kenilworth, New Jersey, USA) by intramuscular injection …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Conflict of interest: None declared.