Abstract
Twenty-one hemophilia patients followed at St. Marianna University Hospital were investigated for the detection of antibody against hepatitis C virus (HCV). All patients had been received at least three years. We examined HCV antibody serially for those patients. The relation between titer of HCV antibody and the levels of alanine aminotransferase (ALT) was studied.
The overall prevalence of HCV antibody positivity was 85.7% (18/21 patients). Four patients went from seropositive to seronegative, however, fourteen patients were repeatedly seropositive. In these four patients, three of them showed normalized ALT levels accompanied with decreased levels of HCV antibody.
Furthermore, six repeatedly seropositive patients and three seroconverted (from seropositive to seronegative) patients were investigated to detect HCV genome by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) technique using NS-5 region primers diverted from the HCV nucleotide sequence (Houghton et al. European patent 0318216. 1989).
In five of the former six patients HCV genome were detected, but in the latter three patients HCV genome could not be detected.
