Quantification of hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA is essential for the everyday management of chronic hepatitis C therapy. "Real-time" PCR techniques are potentially more sensitive than classical PCR techniques, are not prone to carryover contamination, and have a consistently wider dynamic range of quantification. Thus, they are rapidly replacing other technologies for routine quantification of HC...

BACKGROUND Immunologic alterations have been reported in chronic haemodialysis (HD) patients. Some HD patients may have, therefore, an inability to produce detectable amounts of serum antibodies to hepatitis C virus (anti-HCV). Previous studies have shown the presence of HCV viraemia in anti-HCV-negative HD patients (ranging from 1 to 15%). However, the universal epidemiologic impact of these c...

Quantification of hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA is essential for the everyday management of chronic hepatitis C therapy. " Real-time " polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques are potentially more sensitive than classical PCR techniques, are not prone to carryover contamination, and have a consistently wider dynamic range of quantification. Thus they are rapidly replacing other technologies for...

Background and Aims: DNA constructs containing HCV antigens have become one of the vaccine candidates for induction of anti-HCV cellular and humoral immunity. In this study, we constructed a novel expressing vector harboring a fusion sequence derived from an overlapping fragment in the middle of NS3 and a truncated core fragment to avoid troubles reported to be associated with full gene express...

Objective Third generation anti-HCV ELISA is currently recommended for the diagnosis of HCV infection. We determined its specificity in voluntary blood donors (VBDs) and patients with chronic liver disease (CLD) in relation to confirmatory line immunoassay (LIA) and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Material and Methods: 1926 serum samples of VBDs and 16 HCV related CLD ...

The Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection exhibits a high global prevalence frequently associated with hepatocellular carcinoma, taking years to develop. Despite the standardization of highly sensitive HCV quantitative RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) detection methods, false-negative diagnoses may be generated with current methods, mainly due to the presence of PCR inhibitors and/or low viral loads in the patient...

BACKGROUND Patients exposed to hepatitis C virus (HCV) may develop chronic infection with viremia. The diagnosis of this condition requires the use of several laboratory tests in algorithms tailored to the population and resources available for each laboratory. AIM We compared the diagnostic efficacy of two diagnostic algorithms for the identification of viremic patients with HCV. One based o...

Objective Third generation anti-HCV ELISA is currently recommended for the diagnosis of HCV infection. We determined its specificity in voluntary blood donors (VBDs) and patients with chronic liver disease (CLD) in relation to confirmatory line immunoassay (LIA) and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Material and Methods: 1926 serum samples of VBDs and 16 HCV related CLD ...

background and objectives: hepatitis c virus (hcv) is a major public health problem worldwide. replication and persistence of hcv genome have been described in the liver tissue as well as b cells lymphocyte. several investigations have reported that long-term persistence of hcv in b cells may result in hodgkin and non-hodgkin lymphoma. this study was aimed to determine frequency of hcv rna in h...

BACKGROUND Occult hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is characterised by the presence of HCV-RNA in the liver in the absence of anti-HCV, and serum viral RNA. Up to 70% of these patients also have HCV-RNA in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) but it is not known if HCV is replicating in these cells. AIM We studied possible HCV replication in PBMC of 18 patients with an occult HCV infect...