Clinical utility of hepatitis C virus core antigen

The prevalence of HCV infection is high and it is a major cause of liver-related morbidity and mortality in hemodialysis and renal transplant patients. Diagnosis of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection requires both HCV antibody screening and confirmatory nucleic acid testing (NAT). Hepatitis C virus c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2021-04, Vol.16 (4), p.e0250263
Main Authors: Ponnuvel, Suresh, Fletcher, Gnanadurai John, Anantharam, Raghavendran, Varughese, Santosh, David, Vinoy George, Abraham, Priya
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Diagnosis
Genetic aspects
Hemodialysis patients
Hepatitis C
Physiological aspects
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The prevalence of HCV infection is high and it is a major cause of liver-related morbidity and mortality in hemodialysis and renal transplant patients. Diagnosis of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection requires both HCV antibody screening and confirmatory nucleic acid testing (NAT). Hepatitis C virus core antigen (HCVcAg) is a reliable direct viral marker to identify active HCV infection. To assess the clinical utility of HCV core antigen to identify active HCV infection in hemodialysis and renal transplant patients. A representative total of 231 plasma samples with a predominance of low viral load were included for HCVcAg testing and its performance characteristics were compared with the gold standard HCV RNA. Comparison of HCVcAg with HCV RNA showed an excellent specificity of 99% (95% CI: 94.7 to 100%) and sensitivity of 80.62% (95% CI: 73.59 to 87.7%). Likewise, the PPV and NPV of HCVcAg were 99.1% (95% CI: 93.7% to 99.9%) and 80.2% (95% CI: 74% to 85.2%) respectively. The correlation between HCVcAg and HCV RNA was found to be good (R.sup.2 = 0.86, p
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0250263