fatboy, mikesimon, indiana,

I would like your opinion on an article I found at medscape.com.

The article is called "Recovery, Persistence, and Sequelae in Hepatitis C Infection: A Perspective on Long-term Outcome" by harvey Alter adn Leonard B. Seef of the National Institutes of Health.

The article can be found at: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/410845.

The article has several interesting points, but some that I draw your attention to are:

"We conclude with the view that severe, life-threatening, progressive liver disease clearly occurs in a sizeable minority (perhaps 30%) of chronically infected persons but speculate that fibrosis progression is neither linear or inevitable and hence most hepatitis C virus carriers will have either a stable nonprogressive course or such indolent progression that they will die from an unrelated disease before the severe sequelae of hepatitis C become manifest..."

Okay, this sounds good ... only approx 30% with Hep C develop severe liver disease. So, that gives us all hope, but how does one specualte who will be among the 30%?

Another part of the article states "Because the rate of fibrosis progression was not normally distributed, they considered it likely that there three separate populations with regard to outcome: rapid fibrosers, intermediate fibrosers, and slow fibrosers. These data prompted their view that about one third of HCV-infected persons will advance to cirrhosis in less than 20 years and that another one third would either never develop cirrhosis or would do so over a span of at least 50 years."

Comments are welcome...