Managing the Fruits of HCV Cure: How Much Care do the Cured Need?

In case you missed it

The following article appeared in the January/February print edition of HCV NEXT, provided online at Healio. 

Editorial
Managing the Fruits of HCV Cure: How Much Care do the Cured Need?

The feature by Eric Lawitz, MD, very nicely encapsulates the revolutionary changes occurring within hepatitis C therapy over the past few years. As he explains, this extraordinary newfound ability to cure almost all patients with chronic HCV raises many questions about clinical outcomes.

We’ve felt strongly for years that it was unjust to deny therapy to patients who didn’t have “sufficiently advanced scarring of the liver to warrant treatment” — a cost-based position that was anathema to most clinicians and patients. Today, there’s a wealth of literature showing fibrosis progression stabilizes or reverses after achieving SVR. Even patients with cirrhosis may have regression of cirrhosis after SVR. But an additional dimension of HCV infection about which our knowledge has dramatically expanded is the potential for extrahepatic morbidity and mortality associated with HCV infection, and the opportunity to ameliorate or prevent such outcomes by effecting virologic cure — problems such as diabetes, atherosclerosis, renal disease, cryoglobulinemia, lymphoma and others.

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