Abstract
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is the leading cause of chronic hepatitis worldwide and its subtypes/genotypes are clinically important for clinical management and vaccine development. The present study describes frequency distribution of different HCV genotypes and their treatment status in HCV RNA positive patients from district Swat. A total of 185 HCV infected sera were analyzed by molecular genotyping assay. The most prevalent genotype was 3a (34.1%), followed by 2a (8.1%), 3b (7%) and 1a (5.4%). The samples found untypable by the present method of genotypes was 37.8% while, patients with mixed genotype infections were 7.6%. More than 80% of untypable cases were from those HCV patients who had received interferon plus ribavirin standard therapy in the past and either were non-responders and were relapsed thereafter or were under treatment. In conclusion, genotype 3a is the most prevalent HCV genotype in the region. A high prevalence rate of untypable genotypes is present in treated patients that need further investigation for the successful genotyping by developing new assays or using viral sequencing method.
Highlights
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a positive single strand RNA virus of Flaviviridae family [1,2] that is approximately 9.6 Kb in length having a 5’ non-coding region (5’NCR), a long open reading frame (ORF) encoding a polyprotein precursor of 3,000 amino acids and 3’NCR
Viral infection is the major cause of liver cirrhosis in approximately 20% of patients that after 10 years lead to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in a subset of incidence of 3%per year [6]
There are 200 million people of the world population are infected with HCV [10] of which the seroprevalence rate is about 1% in North America, Mediterranean and in Asian countries it is about 3-4%, while in central Africa and Egypt it is 10-20% [11,12]
Summary
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a positive single strand RNA virus of Flaviviridae family [1,2] that is approximately 9.6 Kb in length having a 5’ non-coding region (5’NCR), a long open reading frame (ORF) encoding a polyprotein precursor of 3,000 amino acids and 3’NCR. Functions of 5’NCR as an internal ribosomal entry site (IRES) is important for cap-independent translation of the viral RNA [3]. The virus infect hepatocytes and B lymphocytes of human cells [4,5], and produce 10 trillion virus particles per day, even in the late phase of infection [1]. Viral infection is the major cause of liver cirrhosis in approximately 20% of patients that after 10 years lead to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in a subset of incidence of 3%per year [6]. There are 200 million people of the world population are infected with HCV [10] of which the seroprevalence rate is about 1% in North America, Mediterranean and in Asian countries it is about 3-4%, while in central Africa and Egypt it is 10-20% [11,12]
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