[Investigation of the relationship between hepatitis c virus (HCV) genotypes with HCV-RNA and alanine aminotransferase levels in chronic hepatitis c patients].

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections are of particular importance owing to its high frequency of chronicity, leading to hepatic failure, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. The objective of this retrospective study was to determine the distribution of HCV genotypes in patients with chronic hepatitis C infection at our region and to investigate the relation between genotypes and serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and HCV-RNA levels. Serum samples from 52 patients (26 females, 26 males; mean age: 51.07 +/- 13.13 years) with chronic HCV infection were analyzed in this study. Viral genotypes were determined by using the Versant HCV genotype assay (LiPA) 2.0 system (Bayer HealthCare LLC, USA) according to the manufacturer's instructions. Quantitative HCV-RNA assay was performed by a commercial real-time PCR method (Abbott Molecular Inc., USA). Genotype 1b was observed in 76.9% (n = 40), genotype 3a in 9.6% (n = 5), genotype 4e in 5.7% (n = 3), genotype 2a/2c in 3.8% (n = 2), genotype 1a in 1.9% (n = 1) and genotype 4 in 1.9% (n = 1) of the 52 patients. No statistically significant difference was detected between HCV genotypes and HCV-RNA quantities (p = 0.840; p > 0.05) and serum ALT levels (p = 0.512; p > 0.05). The mean age of the patients infected with genotype 1 (51.4 +/- 12.6 years) we e statistically significantly higher than the mean age of the patients infected with type 2 and 3 (37.8 +/- 12.3 years), (p = 0.023). However, no statistically significant difference was detected for the mean age of genotype 4 infected patients (41.7 +/- 4.5 years), (p > 0.05). These results indicated that the HCV genotype distribution observed in this study was similar to the other results obtained in Turkey and there were no association between HCV genotypes and serum ALT and HCV-RNA quantities.