hepatitis c

The pain is debilitating. The only option: smoking medical marijuana. That's the reality for many hepatitis C patients whose road to health includes a liver transplant.

Although Canadian transplant centres are more willing than those in the United States, not everyone says yes to liver patients who smoke marijuana, and a University of Alberta researcher says that decision-making process is unacceptable.

Using a novel technique, medical and engineering researchers have discovered a vulnerable step in the virus' reproduction process that in lab testing could be effectively targeted with an obsolete antihistamine.

A key enzyme may explain how hepatitis C infection leads to serious liver diseases. A new shows that fatty acid synthase is highly elevated in human liver cells exposed to the hepatitis C virus, suggesting that testing enzyme levels could help predict more serious, long-lasting health consequences from hepatitis C.

(University of Oklahoma) A statin drug used to lower cholesterol found to stop hepatitis C, especially in patients resistant to standard treatment.

The hepatitis C therapy peginterferon alfa-2b, when given as low-dose maintenance therapy, can prevent disease progression in certain patients who failed previous interferon-based hepatitis C therapies and have advanced liver disease.

Scientists have provided evidence of a protein that inhibits the hepatitis C virus at an early stage of its infective cycle.

This research suggests possible new perspectives for the development of therapies to block the virus before it enters a cell.

Hepatitis C is a major public health problem that affects some 130 million people throughout the world.

Hepatitis C-related deaths in the United States increased by 123 percent from 1995 through 2004, the most recent year for which data are available.

Mortality rates peaked in 2002, then declined slightly overall, while continuing to rise among people 55 to 64 years old.

Scientists have discovered a method to disrupt the production of infectious virus particles that cause hepatitis C, a blood-borne liver disease.

This discovery might be a first step in developing new and more effective therapies against the hepatitis C virus.

Current anti-virals are ineffective for the majority of patients infected with the viral strains most prevalent in the United States.

An investigational antiviral drug currently undergoing human trials in Europe for treating hepatitis C infections may have potential to reduce muscle cell damage in Duchenne and other forms of muscular dystrophy.

A research team led by Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center reported their results using three different mouse models of MD in a letter posted online March 16 by the journal Nature Medicine.

An investigational antiviral drug currently undergoing human trials in Europe for treating hepatitis C infections may have potential to reduce muscle cell damage in Duchenne and other forms of muscular dystrophy according to results using three different mouse models of MD.