الفهرس 
INTRODUCTION AND AIM OF THE WORK
Aim of the workOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Hepatitis C virus proved to be one of the most common causes of liver diseases world wide and it represents a major health problem in Egypt.
Recent evidence links HCV with a number of diverse disease processes thought to have autoimmune bases including Sjogren’s disease, glomerulonephritis and cryoglobulinaemia.
There has been increasingly frequent reports about the association between hepatitis C and diabetes mellitus.
In this study, we looked for the frequency of cryoglobulinemia in patients with chronic liver disease secondary to HCV infection, the association between DM and chronic liver disease secondary to HCV infection, the frequency of extrahepatic manifestations in patients with chronic liver disease secondary to HCV infection and their relation with cryoglobulinemia.
Three different groups of patients were included in this study, the first group included 284 patients with liver cirrhosis (228 males and 56 females). The second group included 63 seropositive blood donors who had positive HBsAg and/or HCV-Ab and RNA, positive cases without previous history of either liver disease or diabetes (62 males and 1 female), the third group included 93 patients with type II diabetes mellitus without history of liver disease (80 males and 13 females).
Out of 284 patients with liver cirrhosis, 215 (75.7%) had evidence of HCV infection (All of them had positive HCV-Ab) HCV-RNA was positive for all 32 cases for whom PCR was performed, 61 (21.5%) had positive HBsAg, 8 (2.8%) had both HCV and HBsAg. The ratio of HCV.