Search

A high prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus in patients with hepatitis C virus (HCV)-related chronic liver diseases has been reported in numerous studies. Other studies failed to confirm this observation. We have studied the relative prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus in two groups of patients respectively presenting with HCV-related chronic liver disease (224 patients) and chronic liver diseases of other etiologies (30 hepatitis B virus-HBV-related chronic liver disease, 22 alcoholic liver cirrhosis), in order to confront them. Our study revealed a higher prevalence of diabetes mellitus in the group of patients with HCV-related chronic liver disease in comparison with the group of patients with chronic liver disease of other etiologies (32.5 vs 15.3%; p = 0.03). Patients with HBV-related liver disease had diabetes in 6.6% of cases, and the difference with patients with HCV-related disease was significant (p = 0.007). Our study confirms a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus in patients with HCV-related chronic liver disease. It could be suggested that type 2 diabetes mellitus in patients with HCV-related chronic liver disease could be facilitated by hepatic iron overload and mitochondrial damage.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is responsible for a high percentage of cases of transfusional hepatitis and is often considered the etiological agent of numerous cases of non-A, non-B hepatitis in which parenteral transmission has not been documented. Patients undergoing hemodialysis are at risk for HCV infection. We used an immunoenzymatic method and confirmatory test (neutralization test) to determine serum anti-HCV antibody positivity in order to identify the factors associated with increased risk of HCV infection. We studied 63 hemodialyzed patients from eastern Sicily and compared the mean dialytic age and transfusion case history in positive and negative groups. 17.4 percent of the patients were anti-HCV positive. Mean dialytic age was significantly higher in the anti-HCV positive group. On the contrary no significant differences regarding transfusion case history or number of units of blood transfused were seen in the two groups. Our study confirms that hemodialyzed patients are at risk for HCV infection. This risk seems to increase with dialytic age. The lack of correlation between HCV and transfusion case history suggests that it may be a hospital-acquired infection.