What Is "Successful" Treatment?
The goals of treatment are to significantly reduce or eliminate the virus in
your blood (virologic response) and reduce inflammation in the liver
(histologic response).
There are three main ways doctors evaluate your treatment:
-
Virologic Response:
how much hepatitis C virus is in your blood? This is known as your "viral
load." It's the most common way to evaluate hepatitis C treatment. The best
result would be a "sustained virologic response," which simply means that the
virus is still undetectable in your blood 6 months or more after you complete
treatment. In studies that followed patients for up to 5 years after their
sustained virologic response, fewer than 1% had a recurrence of HCV infection
-
Histologic Response:
has your liver inflammation gone down? Therapy may help your liver by reducing
inflammation
-
Liver Enzymes: do you have high levels of ALT in
your blood? An increase in a liver enzyme called alanine aminotransferase (ALT)
indicates liver damage. However, 40% of people with chronic hepatitis C do not
have elevated ALT levels. And your ALT level alone is not sufficient to
determine the progression of your condition
Combination therapy with pegylated interferon and ribavirin can render the virus
undetectable in up to 5 out of 10 patients with genotype 1, and in up to 8 out
of 10 persons with genotypes 2 and 3.
Continue to
learn the duration of treatment