BackgroundWe investigated whether the administration of maintenance doses of interferon prevented hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in patients with chronic hepatitis C.MethodsStudy 1: A multicenter, retrospective, cooperative study was carried out to determine whether long-term administration of low-dose peginterferon alpha-2a (PegIFNα-2a) prevented HCC development in patients with chronic hepatitis C. In total, 594 chronic hepatitis C patients without a history of HCC were enrolled and treated with 90 μg PegIFNα-2a administered weekly or bi-weekly for at least 1 year. Study 2: HCC developed in 16 of 99 additional patients without PegIFNα-2a treatment during 3.8 years of observation. A propensity-matched control study was then carried out to compare the incidence of HCC between the 59 patients who received low-dose PegIFNα-2a (PegIFNα-2a group) and 59 patients who did not receive PegIFNα-2a treatment (control group), matched for sex, age, platelet count, and total bilirubin levels.ResultsStudy 1: HCC developed in 49 patients. The risk of HCC was lower in patients with undetectable hepatitis C virus RNA, ≤40 IU/L alanine aminotransferase (ALT), or ≤10 ng/L alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) 24 weeks after the start of therapy. Study 2: The incidence of HCC was significantly lower in the PegIFNα-2a group than in the control group.ConclusionsLow-dose and long-term maintenance administration of PegIFNα-2a decreased the incidence of HCC in patients with normalized ALT and AFP levels at 24 weeks compared with patients without normal ALT and AFP levels.
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Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. The exclusive electroproduction process ep → e nπ + was measured in the range of the photon virtuality Q 2 = 1.7-4.5 GeV 2 , and the invariant mass range for the nπ + system of W = 1.15-1.7 GeV using the CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer. For the first time, these kinematics are probed in exclusive π + production from protons with nearly full coverage in the azimuthal and polar angles of the nπ + center-of-mass system. The nπ + channel has particular sensitivity to the isospin 1 2 excited nucleon states, and together with the pπ 0 final state will serve to determine the transition form factors of a large number of resonances. The largest discrepancy between these results and present modes was seen in the σ LT structure function. In this experiment, 31,295 cross section and 4,184 asymmetry data points were measured. Because of the large volume of data, only a reduced set of structure functions and Legendre polynomial moments can be presented that are obtained in model-independent fits to the differential cross sections.
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