Vitamin B12 supplementation improves rates of sustained viral response in patients chronically infected with hepatitis C virus

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12).

To assess the effect of vitamin B12 on virological response in patients with chronic HCV hepatitis naïve to antiviral therapy.

Why It Was Studied

In vitro, vitamin B12 acts as a natural inhibitor of hepatitis C virus (HCV) replication.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Ninety-four patients with chronic HCV hepatitis were randomly assigned to receive pegylated interferon α plus ribavirin (standard-of-care; SOC) or SOC plus vitamin B12 (SOC+B12).

Viral response-namely, undetectable serum HCV-RNA, was evaluated 4 weeks after starting treatment (rapid viral response), 12 weeks after starting treatment (complete early viral response) and 24 or 48 weeks after starting treatment (end-of-treatment viral response) and 24 weeks after completing treatment (sustained viral response (SVR)).

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Genotyping for the interleukin (IL)-28B polymorphism was performed a posteriori in a subset (42/64) of HCV genotype 1 carriers.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Algorithms, Antiviral Agents, Hepacivirus, Hepatitis C, Chronic, Interferon-alpha, Multivariate Analysis and Polyethylene Glycols.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12).

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2013 (Gut), a journal based in England.

More context: the Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) compound page, all human trials.