الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Summary and Conclusions
Hepatitis C virus is a serious health concern and an important cause of chronic liver disease, leading to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma in humans. It is estimated that nearly 170 million individual’s world wide are currently infected with HCV. Of particular concern is that the virus establishes a chronic infection in up to 85% of cases and that there is no specific and broadly effective HCV vaccine up to date.
Since December 2008 and September 2009, respectively, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of pegylated interferon-α in combination with ribavirin in the United States and Europe for children aged 3 years and older and until recently, only those two drugs are the only approved for treatment of HCV in children. Trials are now being conducted on the safety and efficacy of sofosbuvir and ribavirin in adolescents and children with genotype 2 or 3 chronic HCV infection.
Host genetic factors play a vital role in the spontaneous and treatment-induced clearance of HCV infection from infected patients. Genome-wide association studies have identified a single nucleotide polymorphism near the IL28B gene on chromosomes 19 that encodes interferon lambda 3 (IFN-ƛ3), which is considered to be strongly effective against HCV. It is associated with treatment-induced and spontaneous clearance of HCV from infected patients and predicts the response to the antiviral therapy
The aim of this work was to evaluate the role of a single nucleotide polymorphism rs12979860 near the Interleukin 28B gene
Summary and conclusions
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in predicting the response to pegylated interferon-α and ribavirin treatment in hepatitis C virus infected children.
Sixty nine patients were included in this study with chronic HCV infection, from Pediatric Hepatology Department, National Liver Institute, Menoufia University. They were 40 males and 29 females. The mean age of our patients was 11.1± 3.6 years, they underwent full history taking and thorough clinical examination and abattary of investigations including HCV antibody, PCR for HCV-RNA and hepatitis B viral markers. 67 patients received antiviral therapy consisting of Peg-IFN-α 2b with a dose of 60 ug /1.73 m plus ribavirin 15 mg/kg/day orally. According to the response, patients were classified into two groups, responders; they were 27 patients, 18 males and 9 females and non-responders; they were 40 patients, 20 males and 20 females and the virus spontonously cleared in only 2 patients.
Patients with decompensated liver disease, cirrhosis, impaired renal functions or patients with combined viral infection, HCV and other coexistent liver disease such as Wilson’ disease, autoimmune hepatitis were all excluded from the study.
Data were collected analyzed using the SPSS package for Windows, version 18.0, SPSS Inc., Chicago, Illinois, USA. Qualitative data were expressed as frequency and percentage. Quantitative data were shown as mean ± stander deviation (SD). The