Antibody to Hepatitis C Virus and Liver Disease in Volunteer Blood Donors

Abstract

In blood donors, the anti-HCV RIBA is not only more specific than the anti-HCV ELISA, but is also useful in identifying patients who have an underlying chronic liver disease.

Hepatitis C Antibody after Kidney Transplantation: Clinical Significance

“…However, both groups of patients would be infective as the presence of antibodies to the antigen c33-c and c22-3 seems to pre dict infectivity [35], Those 4-RIBA indeterminate patients are difficult to consider either as anti-HCV positive or negative. The low infectivity of this kind of blood donors [41] suggests that they could be considered asnoninfectious, but an indeter minate RIBA pattern associated with an elevated ALT level indicates hepatitis C infection [29], In our series, 2 of 11 indeterminate 4-RIBA patients had chronic liver dis ease, one of them with a long-term history of alcohol abuse and the other without any identifiable cause of liver disease.…”

“…False-posi tive anti-HCV have been reported in several situations [27,28], and cases of suspected non-A, non-B hepatitis were false-negative by first-generation EIA [30,31]. Firstgeneration RIBA with the 5-1-1 and cl00-3 antigens improved the specificity but it could not be considered a real confirmatory test because of the large number of indeterminate results and has been considered merely a supplementary test [29,32], 4-RIBA has a high specificity in patients with post-transfusional non-A, non-B hepati tis, in alcoholics with chronic active hepatitis and in patients with autoantibodies [33], Furthermore, 4-RIBA distinguished infectious HCV c l00-3 ELISA positive blood products form noninfectious ones and reduced the nonspecific results of anti-HCV screening for blood prod ucts [34,35],…”

“…Several reports concerning the prevalence and outcome of hepatitis C among kidney transplant recipi ents have been published [21][22][23][24][25][26], the prevalence varied between 6 and 22% and it was related to the situation of the patients on dialysis and decreased significantly after tranplantation [21,24], The impact of anti-HCV on patient and graft survival was analyzed by Roth et al [21] who did not find any adverse effect to the graft or the patient. However, anti-HCV antibody was determined in these studies by a first-generation enzyme-linked immu nosorbent assay (ELISA) that generates false-positive re sults [27,28], or first-generation immunoblot assay (RIBA) that improves the specificity but with a large number of indeterminate results [29],…”

Hepatitis G virus: What is the next step?

“…The finding of similar HGV prevalences in blood donors with and without biochemical abnormalities suggests that many infected patients are viremic in the absence of liver disease. Although a normal ALT value does not prove normal histology, 19 the negative association between HGV and an elevated ALT level suggests a lack of pathogenicity to the liver.…”

Epidemiology of Viral Hepatitis in Dialysis Centers: A National Survey

“…Sandrini [37] observed 13 patients with HBV of 93 renal transplant receivers [14%]: Niu [32] reports an 8% annual incidence of serologically positive HBV subjects in dialysis: and finally, the Center for Disease Control, which in 1980 surveyed 968 USA dialysis centers totalling 43,796 patients, reported an HBV incidence of 3.8% [2], Furthermore, although HBV vaccination seems to pro duce highly positive results in reducing the incidence of this infection [11,12,34,39], there are ever more frequent reports of non-A. non-B and C VH [1,14,15,19,26,36,41,44,46] which could run a high risk of deteriorating to chronic cirrhogenous an d /o r neoplastic forms [4,27,33]. Therefore, the particular interest which such reports raise in Nephrology and dialysis centres, where immunodepressed uremic patients undergoing substitutive therapy (HD, DP, transplantation) are certainly exposed to a maxi mal risk, is obvious.…”