Analysis of hepatitis G virus infection markers in blood donors and patients with hepatitis

Abstract

The incidence and clinical significance of hepatitis G virus (HGV) is still not fully known. The aim of our study was to assess the frequency of HGV RNA and antibody to HGV E2 protein (anti-E2) in Polish blood donors and patients with hepatitis, and to compare the sequence of HGV clones with those reported by others. Two-hundred and nineteen blood donors and 83 patients with hepatitis were studied. HGV was detected in 3.2% and anti-E2 in 24.2% of blood donors and in 26.5% and 8.4% of patients with hepatitis, respectively. HGV was detected as a co-infection with HCV in four of 18 patients with chronic hepatitis, in four of 16 patients with acute hepatitis and in one of six patients with fulminant liver failure (FLF), and as a co-infection with HBV in one of six patients with FLF and in three of 10 patients with chronic hepatitis. In non-A-C hepatitis, eight of 23 patients with acute hepatitis and one of four patients with FLF were positive for HGV but all 10 patients with chronic cryptogenic hepatitis were negative. In the follow-up studies of patients with HGV alone, a correlation with viraemia and clinical symptoms was observed in two patients, but in three others HGV RNA was detected in spite of clinical resolution. Two HGV clones were sequenced, and the sequence of the HGV helicase region of the HGV isolates from donor and patient were homologous to those described by others. Hence, the frequency of HGV RNA in blood donors is similar to that obtained in other countries but the anti-E2 (marker of a past infection) frequency is higher. The incidence of HGV RNA and anti-E2 in hepatitis patients suggests that HGV plays a role in liver pathology, but careful analysis of individual cases does not confirm this.

Prevalence and Sequence Variability of GBV-C Genomes among Blood Donors in Northern Germany

“…This proportion correlated well with values previously reported for other geographic regions [1,8,10,[19][20][21]. Although GBV-C was mostly detected in the sera of blood donors with normal or modestly elevated ALT levels, it is not known if these donors are healthy carriers or patients at a quiescent stage of their disease.…”

Detection and genotyping of GBV‐C virus in the United Arab Emirates

“…The study showed a rate of infection of 11.1% (14 out of 126) among the healthy national individuals of the UAE, which was not statistically different (P > 0.05) from their non-national counterparts residing in the UAE (8.3%; 8 out of 96) as can be seen in Table I. This was higher than the previously reported serum RNA rates of 0.9% [Masuko et al, 1996], 1.4%-4.6% [Forms et al, 1996;Sauleda et al, 1996], 3.2% [Haydon et al, 1997], 2% [Wang et al, 1996], 4.2% [Loisseau et al, 1996], 4%-5% [Moaven et al, 1996], and 1.5%-1.7% [Linnen et al, 1996], 2.7% [Handajani et al, 2000], 3.1%-3.7% [Romano et al, 2000], 2% [Al-Ahdal et al, 2000], 3.2% [Brojer et al, 1999], 2% [Desai et al, 2004], and 3%-7% [Loureiro et al, 2002], and 1.6% [Hitzler and Runkel, 2004] in healthy blood donors in Japan, Spain, UK, Taiwan, France, Australia, the USA, Indonesia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Poland, India, Venezuela, and Germany, respectively, and comparable to the 10% infection rate reported in Brazil [Cheung et al, 1997] and lower than the 14.6% [Konomi et al, 1999] found in Bolivia. These differences in infection rates can be interpreted in terms of sample size used (i.e., number of blood samples tested), method of detection used (antibody vs. PCR) [Cheung et al, 1997;Cacoub et al, 2000], region amplified by PCR and primers used Fig.…”

Global prevalence of human pegivirus‐1 in healthy volunteer blood donors: a systematic review and meta‐analysis

“…In 6 studies , the samples did not include blood donors, 2 studies were carried out on commercial blood donors, and the remaining 3 did not use molecular tests for detecting HPgV‐1. We ended up including 79 studies in the systematic review . The Supplementary content table presents the characteristics of included studies.…”

“…The prevalence rates were reported from a wide range of countries spanning all continents. Five studies reported data from North America, 11 from South America, 21 from Europe, 33 from Asia, 5 from Africa, 2 from Australia, and 1 from both North America and Europe (we did not pool this study for results based on continent of origin). Demographic data were not consistently reported across studies, and we were not able to perform subgroup analyses based on age or gender.…”

“…Also, 7 studies had a minor number of donors who were seropositive for HBV/HCV, and one study had some donors with raised ALT (alanine aminotransferase) levels , but we could no separate their data from the overall results published in the study. Therefore, we decided to exclude these 16 articles from the meta‐analysis leaving us with a total of 63 studies for the quantitative research. It is noteworthy that the 16 excluded articles included the 11 high risk of bias studies found in our methodological review.…”