Antiviral drugs can treat the disease but will lose some effectiveness as chronic hepatitis C progresses. A study published in the Journal of Medical Virology found that people who had cleared the hepatitis C virus from their bloodstream after six months of therapy remained hepatitis C negative for up to 12 years Still,, when liver biopsies were performed in a subgroup of patients, researchers found that some had mild inflammation in their livers. In total, about 10 percent of patients, all of whom had liver disease before treatment, developed liver cancer.
"It provides a word of caution when we tell patients that they are cured," says Dr. Emmet Keeffe, a liver specialist and the chief of hepatology at Stanford University Medical Center in California. "We know people who have responded to therapy successfully without detectable virus six months after completion of therapy have a more than 95 percent chance of not having the virus detected in their blood on long-term follow-up. This study takes it a bit further by looking at liver tissue.”
Below, Keeffe discusses the transmission and treatment of hepatitis C.
What are the symptoms of hepatitis?
When symptoms do occur, they are typically gastrointestinal in nature—nausea, upset stomach, vomiting. There's often, but not always, a fever. Malaise, or a general feeling of being run down or fatigued, is also present. So it's a flu-like illness, although it's more severe.
When viral hepatitis is particularly severe, the individual will develop jaundice, in which the skin and the whites of the eye become yellow.
