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Background: Hepatitis virus C (HCV) infection is affecting millions of people globally with an estimated prevalence in Pakistan ranging from 4.5 to 8%. Advent of oral direct acting antiviral agents (DAAs) in combination therapy has made possible the treatment of decompensated cirrhosis secondary to hepatitis C (HCV) infection. Therefore, this study focused to evaluate safety and efficacy of direct antiviral agents (DAAs) in compensated and decompensated cirrhotic patients. Materials and Methods: This cross sectional study was conducted in the Department of Hepatogastroenterology, Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT) Karachi, from 1st September 2017 to 30th June 2018. Patients diagnosed with HCV, presenting in outpatient department were enrolled. All patients received Daclatasavir, Sofosbuvir and Ribavirin combination. Patient without cirrhosis and with cirrhosis received treatment for 12 and 24 weeks, respectively. End of treatment response was taken as primary end point. Statistical analysis was performed by SPSS version 20.0. Results: Out of 180 patients, 88(48.9%) were male and 92(51.1%) were female, with mean age of 44.59±11.29 years. Majority had genotype 3 i.e., 145(80.6%). In this study population, 97(53.9%) patients were non-cirrhotic and received 3 months treatment while 83(46.1%) cirrhotic patient got 6 months treatment. Post- stratification observed that young patients have better treatment response rate than older individuals (p-=0.031) On the other hand, statistical insignificant association was observed between end of treatment response with regards to gender, duration of treatment, history of hepatic encephalopathy and ascites. Conclusion: This study concluded that treatment with direct antiviral agents of Hepatitis C virus related chronic liver disease is effectual and has shown equivalent response in cirrhotic and non-cirrhotic patients. Age is an important factor affecting treatment response i.e, better response achieved in patient with less than 45 years.

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INTRODUCTION: Celiac disease and tropical sprue are common causes of chronic diarrhea & duodenal villous atrophy (DVA). Narrow band imaging (NBI) is chromoendoscopic technique which facilitates detailed visualization of the mucosal surface & allows targeted biopsy and thus increases the diagnostic yield of the biopsy specimen. Hence, we aimed to determine the diagnostic accuracy of NBI in detection of DVA using histopathology as a gold standard in chronic diarrhea patients. METHODS: All patients with diarrhea for >4weeks were enrolled. Endoscopy was performed in all the patients to take duodenal biopsy and simultaneously NBI villous pattern was noted. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV), and diagnostic accuracy of NBI were calculated comparing histopathology. RESULTS: Baseline characteristics are shown in Table 1. NBI findings of total patients were finger shaped (normal villi), gyriform (partial villi atrophy) and flat surface (complete villous atrophy) mucosa as 22.6%, 59.7% and 17.7% respectively. NBI has sensitivity, specificity; PPV, NPV, and diagnostic accuracy were 84.9%, 45.2%, 82.3%, 50.0%, and 75% respectively for the detection of DVA as depicted in Table 2. CONCLUSION: This study showed 93 (75%) of participants had DVA in contrast to another study from Pakistan which revealed DVA in 49.8% of patients. This disparity is likely due to difference in study population. Our patients had normal villi, partial and complete villous atrophy in 31 (25%), 72 (58.1%) & 21 (16.9%) respectively with P value 0.001. Dutta AK et al. found that NBI has sensitivity 81-87%, specificity 93%, NPV 96% and PPV 68-77% to detect DVA. We found sensitivity 85%, specificity 45%, NPV 50% & PPV 82.3%. In our study specificity & NPV were lower than in others as we included mild villous atrophy while most of the studies had a greater proportion of patients with moderate to severe villous atrophy. We found that duration of diarrhea is associated with presence of villous atrophy, as disease duration of >5 months had sensitivity 92.1% and specificity 60% while 5 months had sensitivity & specificity 80% & 31.3% respectively. This association was not observed in previous studies. So we conclude NBI is a promising technique for assessment of duodenal mucosal details in patients with longstanding chronic diarrhea.

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