The First Liver Transplant to Erase Hepatitis C
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Hepatitis C gone after liver transplant
Posted : Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:51:49 GMT
Author : Health News Editor
www.earthtimes.org
NAGASAKI, Japan, Aug. 31 A Japanese woman is the first reported case in which a complete recovery from hepatitis C-RNA was achieved after liver transplantation.
The 60-year-old woman with liver cirrhosis and liver cancer caused by hepatitis C had been diagnosed diabetic since 1995; and previous chemotherapies to remove cancer didn’t bring any satisfactory result.
Dr. Tatsuki Ichikawa of the Nagasaki University Hospital, in Japan, was hesitant to give the woman a donated piece of the liver offered by her daughter fearing the new liver would get reinfected and progress rapidly to liver cancer. Previous data indicated that complete clearance of hepatitis C is necessary for a good outcome of a liver transplant.
To save the life of the patient, Ichikawa used a more powerful drug — PEGylated IFN — before liver transplantation and five weeks after the PEG-IFN treatment, the hepatitis antigen was no longer detectable from the patient but hepatitis-RNA persisted, even after 18 weeks of treatment, so liver transplantation was performed.
Unexpectedly, clearance of hepatitis C-RNA was achieved just one month after the successful liver transplantation and HCV was never detected in this patient thereafter, reported the case study published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology.
