Vitamin D levels in Egyptian HCV patients (genotype 4) treated with pegylated interferon.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, published as a controlled clinical trial.

Deficiency of vitamin D has been recently associated to the lack of response to interferon therapy in Hepatitis C virus genotype 1 infected patients.

This study aims to evaluate serum level of vitamin D and verify whether circulating vitamin D has any independent role in predicting the rates of HCV virologic response after the administration of pegylated interferon to Egyptian patients infected with genotype 4 HCV.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as teenagers, young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Fifty patients infected with HCV genotype 4 and not co-infected with neither Hepatitis B virus nor Human Immunodeffiency Virus were recruited for the study.

Viral titer was determined at baseline, at 12 weeks and at end of treatment (48 weeks).

How the Study Was Run

They were treated with ribavirin-pegylated interferon alpha 2a.

Vitamin D levels and a biochemical profile were obtained for the patients at baseline and at end of treatment.

Vitamin D control group consisting of 20 healthy patients of similar age and weight to the study group were recruited to obtain vitamin D levels.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Antiviral Agents, Drug Monitoring, Egypt, Genotype, Hepacivirus, Hepatitis C, Chronic and Interferon-alpha.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a controlled clinical trial of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Its findings take up roughly 3 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 (Acta gastro-enterologica Belgica), a journal based in Belgium.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.