Review article
HEPATITIS C - CLINICAL MANIFESTATIONS AND COMPLICATIONS
Sandra Milić
; Department of gastroenterology, Clinical hospital center Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Ivana Mikolašević
; School of Medicine, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia
Abstract
SUMMARY
HCV infection usually presents as an acute infection, chronic infection or as an extrahepatic manifestation. Acute infection is rarely recognized in clinical practice because the large majority of the patients are asymptomatic or develop symptoms which don’t attract clinical attention such as sickness, anorexy, anxiety and pain in the upper right quadrant of stomach, mialgy and
artralgy. Therefore, chronic hepatitis is diagnosed in a large majority of the patients after many years in case of large values of aminotransferasis during a routine laboratory check. A vast number of diseases are directly or indirectly connected with chronic hepatitis C. It is known for some of the extrahepatic manifestations to be firmly connected with hepatitis C while there is a doubt for others. Chronic hepatitis C is disease with no symptoms manifested for a long time or the symptoms are uncharacteristic, so it often becomes visible after development end-stage liver disease. It is considered that around 20% of the patients with the chronic type of the disease will develop cirrhosis within a period of 10 – 30 years with the possibility of developing hepatocellular
carcinoma in 1% – 5% of the cases per year. Furthemore, decompensation of liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma are the leading indications for liver transplantation in patients with chronic hepatitis C.
Keywords
acute infection; chronic infection; extrahepatic manifestation; cirrhosis; hepatocellular carcinoma; liver transplantation
Hrčak ID:
22563
URI
Publication date:
25.6.2007.
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