Prospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Nov 28, 2017; 23(44): 7899-7905
Published online Nov 28, 2017. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v23.i44.7899
Dramatic response of hepatitis C patients chronically infected with hepatitis C virus genotype 3 to sofosbuvir-based therapies in Punjab, Pakistan: A prospective study
Sajjad Iqbal, Muhammad Haroon Yousuf, Muhammad Iftikhar Yousaf
Sajjad Iqbal, Department of Pathology, Shalamar Hospital, Lahore 54840, Pakistan
Muhammad Haroon Yousuf, Muhammad Iftikhar Yousaf, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Shalamar Hospital, Lahore 54840, Pakistan
Author contributions: Iqbal S designed the study, performed the research, analyzed the data and wrote the paper; Yousuf MH and Yousaf MI treated the patients, collected and analyzed the patient data.
Institutional review board statement: The study was reviewed and approved by the review board of Shalamar Hospital Lahore, Pakistan.
Informed consent statement: All study participants, or their legal guardian, provided informed written consent prior to study enrollment.
Conflict-of-interest statement: There was no conflict of interest in this study.
Data sharing statement: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Sajjad Iqbal, PhD, Department of Pathology, Shalamar Hospital, Shalimar Link road Mughal Pura, Lahore 54840, Pakistan. sajjad.iqbal@sihs.org.pk
Telephone: +92-42-111205205 Fax: +92-42-36823712
Received: June 12, 2017
Peer-review started: July 12, 2017
First decision: August 10, 2017
Revised: September 6, 2017
Accepted: September 13, 2017
Article in press: September 13, 2017
Published online: November 28, 2017
Processing time: 138 Days and 16.5 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: Previously, hepatitis C was treated with interferon-based therapies. Intolerable side effects, prolonged treatment duration and unsatisfactory response rates were the major droughts of those therapies. The introduction of sofobuvir (SOF) was claimed as a highly responding oral drug for hepatitis C patients, with minimal side effects in different trials; thus, it was important to assess its efficacy in our population. We found an outstanding response rate of SOF in hepatitis C patients infected with genotype 3 of hepatitis C virus. These findings revealed that with SOF we may eliminate hepatitis C from our population.