Around one in five of people with hepatitis C in the United
States who do not know of their infection may already have advanced liver
damage and be in urgent need of treatment, according to a cross-sectional
survey of participants in the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey
(NHANES) presented by Prowpanga Udompap at the International Liver
Congress in Vienna, Austria, on Saturday.
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) recommends that everyone born between 1945 and 1965 – the 'baby boom'
generation – should be tested for hepatitis C at least once, due to the high
prevalence of hepatitis C in this age group.
However, primary care physicians have been slow to implement
the guidance, and many people who might have been at risk of acquiring
hepatitis C during military service, as a result of blood transfusion or
through injecting drug use are unaware of the availability of hepatitis C
testing and new curative treatment.
As people infected with hepatitis C age, their risk of
progressive liver damage grows, but without diagnosis many people infected in
the 1960s and 1970s will be unaware that they have suffered liver damage.
Without treatment, people with advanced fibrosis may progress
to advanced stages of liver cirrhosis, suffer liver failure and serious
extra-hepatic symptoms or develop liver cancer.
Treatment guidelines recommend that people with advanced
fibrosis (stages F3 and F4) should receive immediate treatment owing to the
high risk of liver disease progression.
In order to quantify the scale of advanced fibrosis in
people with undiagnosed hepatitis C, Prowpanga Udompap and colleagues of Stanford
University used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey
(NHANES II), a cohort of 62,000 American adults. In this cohort, 45,000 people
have been tested for HCV antibody, of whom 591 were positive and 420 had
chronic HCV infection confirmed by RNA testing. Of these, 417 had AST and ALT
liver enzyme measurements and 163 of these had responded to questions about HCV
awareness, and this subset was used to quantify the prevalence of cirrhosis
among undiagnosed people. Forty-nine per cent were unaware of their HCV infection.
The researchers used the FIB-4 system to calculate the risk
of advanced fibrosis. FIB-4 is a validated algorithm for calculating the stage
of liver damage using ALT, AST, platelet levels and age. It has a high positive
predictive value for diagnosing F3/F4 fibrosis.
This study used FIB-4 cut-offs of <1.45 for low
probability of fibrosis, 1.45-<3.25 for intermediate fibrosis, and >3.25
for advanced fibrosis (F3 and F4).
Of the
respondents with known HCV infection, the proportion with a high, intermediate
and low probability of advanced fibrosis was 14.5%, 40.3%, 45.2%, respectively;
in those with undiagnosed HCV the results were 19.1%, 30.9%, 50.0%,
respectively.
Using the aspartate aminotransferase/platelet ratio index
(APRI) produced a similar result, although the estimate of advanced fibrosis in
undiagnosed people was lower (11%).
A recent
study by the US Centers for Disease Control, which used FIB-4 to calculate
liver fibrosis stage in people with a positive HCV RNA test between 2010 and
2013, found that 40% of all patients, and 46% of those in the 1945-1965 birth
cohort, had advanced fibrosis (F3 or F4).