|
 |
 Home > Available Issues |
|
|
 Review Articles |
| Hepatitis C Virus - Diagnosis and Genetic Variability |
| Sook Jin Jang |
| Department of Clinical Pathology, Chosun University College of Medicine, Kwang Ju, Korea |
Vol.17 Num.1 (p1~10)
|
|
|
Hepatitis C virus(HCV) is the one of the major cause of chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. HCV is a single-stranded positive sense RNA virus that has been classified in the Flaviviridae family.
Diagnostic assays for HCV include serologic tests for antibody detection and molecular techniques for detection of viral RNA. Serologic tests such as enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay(EL1SA) and confimatory recombinant immunoblot assay(RU3A) have been used to detect anti-HCV antibodies. The sensitivity of ELISA is comparable to RIBA test. RIBA test has been used to check whether positive reaction on ELISA is nonspecific or not. Detection of HCV RNA in serum by RT-PCR used as a reference method for diagnosis of hepatitis C viral infection. The pretreatment level of HCV RNA appears to be a very important predictor of patient's response to interferon therapy. The assay kits for quantitation of HCV RNA are commercially available
HCV genotype consist of 4 hierarchical strata: groups above subgroups above isolates above quasispecies. Simmon's classification is widely used for HCV classification. Genotypes la, lb, lc. 2a. 2b, 2c, 3a, 3b, 4a. 5a, and 6a are the most commonly encountered. The relative prevalence of HCV subtype l b is high m Korea, Japan and Europe but lower in the united states, where HCV subtype l a is more prevalent.
HCV quasispecies have been studied actively because such informations are useful to predict patient response to interferon therapy and to detect transmission source of HCV infection in epidemiological studies It is possible to overestimate the frequency of quasispecies because some nucleotide sequence data obtained from studies of HCV quasispecies include a high frequency of artefactual substitutions. So it is recommended to use methods to avoid artefactual substitutions to study HCV sequence variation. |
|
|
Keywords : HCV, Diagnosis, Genetic variability, Quasispecies |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
