Bratislava Medical Journal Vol.114, No.4, p.213–217, 2013

Background: The standard therapy for chronic HCV infection is the administration of pegylated interferons in combination with ribavirin. Anemia is a dose-dependent side-effect of ribavirin administration. The degree of anemia could be indicative of the individual exposure to ribavirin.
Aims: 1) To evaluate the correlation of HGB level decreases at specified time-points with a sustained virological response during the antiviral treatment. 2) To compare these parameters with the virological predictors for responses.
Methods: A retrospective analysis of cohort, which comprised 164 patients treated with standard therapy at a tertiary center in Prague, Czech Republic.
Results: We identified several predictive factors for a sustained virological response in females: baseline HGB level ≤140 g/l (p=0.025), maximum drop from baseline >40 g (p=0.039), and a HGB drop in week 4 >30 g (p=0.044). There was only one predictor identified for males: reaching the lowest HGB level after week 19 (p=0.021). The strongest positive predictor of response was a rapid virological response. A low viral load (<600 000 IU/ml) at baseline was not associated with a sustained response in either gender.

Conclusions: The parameters of HGB decrease during antiviral treatment are better correlated with a sustained response in females. None of these response predicting parameters was as significant as that of rapid virological response as that of rapid virological response (Tab. 4, Fig. 1, Ref. 15).