Interferon therapy lowers the rate of progression to hepatocellular carcinoma in chronic hepatitis C but not significantly in an advanced stage: a retrospective study in 1148 patients
Section snippets
Patients and treatment
Patients who were positive for hepatitis B surface antigen or had a history of heavy drinking (daily alcohol intake more than 60 g of ethanol for more than 5 years) were excluded from this study. One thousand two hundred and ninety-nine Japanese CH-C patients received IFN therapy between January 1989 and September 1995 at the 13 hospitals of the Viral Hepatitis Study Groups listed in the Appendix to this paper, the University Hospital, and Kyoto Prefectural Yosanoumi Hospital, of whom 1148
Response to IFN therapy
The distribution of response in each stage of liver disease is shown in Table 2. The rate of SR was well correlated with the stage of liver disease (F1 vs F2; p=0.0008, F2 vs F3; p=0.0001, F3 vs F4; p=0.0269). No significant differences were noted in the response to IFN therapy between males and females in any group.
Among the SR in each group of patients, two of the 40 SR in F1, 12 of the 156 SR in F2, and six of the 61 SR in F3 were positive for serum HCV RNA 6 months after the cessation of
Discussion
We analyzed the effects of IFN therapy for CH-C and cirrhosis on the incidence of subsequent HCC. Development of HCC was significantly reduced in both sustained (SR) and transient responders (TR). The present study also demonstrated that PLT counts, reflecting the stage of chronic hepatitis, were significantly improved in SR after IFN therapy.
The annual incidence of HCC has been reported to be 1.4% in moderate-staged chronic hepatitis, 3% in advanced-staged chronic hepatitis, and 5 to 7% in
Acknowledgements
This study was supported in part by a grant no. 10470139 from the Ministry of Education, Japan. The authors express their thanks Dr. Hiroaki Asano, Department of Computer Science, College of Medical Technology, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, for his advice on the statistical analysis of this study.
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