Haven't visited the board in quite some time but....

[St. George]

was wondering if people here have begun to add Alinia to standard treatment? I did a few years back and it worked. I had treated 3 times before to no avail but the  4th time with Alinia added it worked. just wanted to pass this info along. Ask your docs about it. I was a guinea pig when i tried it and probably one of the first in this country to use it.

[eureka254]

He followed the Phase III trial protocol that was running at that time, 500mg at 12 hour intervals.  We had considered trying to enroll in the Alinia trial, as his treating doc was also recruiting for it at the time, but as a cirrhotic with hcc history he wasn't considered a good candiate for hcv trials, plus we found it wasn't worth the risk to be at the mercy of trial guidelines since doc was willing to prescribe it off label.

[Trish77]

No....not so affordable as I thought. :(   What is the daily dosage please?

[eureka254]

Regarding the cost of Alinia, without rx coverage we'd be paying about $1200 every 4 weeks -- certainly not what I'd consider affordable on a modest income...

[willing]

nicely worded post re the 130 -  makes me wish I had a hat to take off - and thanks for the good wishes.

As far as I know there are 4 main sources of data of ntz in g1s:
stealth-C2, stealth-C3 and the Basu EASL10 study. A recent free access review by Prockros includes ntz citations:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21180601

For G1s NTZ is no silver bullet,  nevertheless it shows a consistent improvement among hard to treat patients.  My hepa was  dismissive, saying 7-8% improvement in odds at best. Fortunately my PCP was more accommodating. Personally, I'll take the  small improvement. Same with SAM-E - no silver bullet but it clearly seems to improve response. Same with high dose RBV.

One thing you learn as you go around the block is that the standard of care is designed to optimize the average outcome. This is good for the overall health care system but does not necessarily help one as a patient. The PI must still do the heavy lifting but anything that safely improves one's  ifn response is worth considering.

Re adding the PI late, as mentioned in an earlier post, there's no data I know of. Nevertheless, PI monotherapy has been shown to consistently knock VL down a couple of log units within days. As shown in a study Bali posted recently, relapse is due to getting to eot with too many remaining  infected cells. If you can knock your remaining virus down by between 99% and 99.9% it seems reasonable to expect relapse odds will diminish.

[evangelin]

Actually, there is at least one good study that has been posted in the past, showing a good result with PPC being used with interferon.  It was posted by HR (Hepatitis Researcher)  I can't remember right now if Ribavirin was used in the study or not.  It was from quite a while ago. I haven't heard of anything recent.
Joe did take it some of the time on his last TX but it got hard to afford with all the other draining expenses we had at the time so we let it go.  He started right back on it after TX failed, and still takes it now.  

[stef2011]

forgot to menthion also PPC in heptoshield stopped any gastro disturb but i think this supplement is not good with interferon