Observational Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Gastroenterol. Dec 28, 2019; 25(48): 6928-6938
Published online Dec 28, 2019. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v25.i48.6928
Hepatitis C virus eradication with directly acting antivirals improves health-related quality of life and psychological symptoms
Silvia Nardelli, Oliviero Riggio, Davide Rosati, Stefania Gioia, Alessio Farcomeni, Lorenzo Ridola
Silvia Nardelli, Oliviero Riggio, Davide Rosati, Stefania Gioia, Lorenzo Ridola, Department of Translational and Precision Medicine, “Sapienza” University of Rome, Rome 00185, Italy
Alessio Farcomeni, Department of Economics & Finance, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome 00185, Italy
Author contributions: Nardelli S and Ridola L drafted the article; Nardelli S, Riggio O and Ridola L contributed to critical revision of the article for important intellectual content; Gioia S and Rosati D contributed to acquisition of data; Nardelli S contributed to conception and design; Farcomeni A performed statistical analysis; Riggio O and Ridola L contributed to final approval of the article.
Institutional review board statement: This study protocol was reviewed and approved by the the Ethical and the Research Committees of the “Sapienza” University of Rome.
Informed consent statement: All study participants or their legal guardian provided informed written consent about personal and medical data collection prior to study enrolment.
Conflict-of-interest statement: S.N. was the winner of a competitive Gilead Fellowship Program 2017 for this project, all the other authors have nothing to disclose and no conflict of interest.
STROBE statement: The authors have read the STROBE Statement-checklist of items, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the STROBE Statement-checklist of items.
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/
Corresponding author: Lorenzo Ridola, MD, PhD, Doctor, Department of Translational and Precision Medicine, “Sapienza” University of Rome, viale dell’Università 37, Rome 00185, Italy. lorenzo.ridola@uniroma1.it
Telephone: +39-773-6556155
Received: October 21, 2019
Peer-review started: October 21, 2019
First decision: November 9, 2019
Revised: December 13, 2019
Accepted: December 22, 2019
Article in press: December 22, 2019
Published online: December 28, 2019
Processing time: 68 Days and 1.2 Hours
Core Tip

Core tip: In patients with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, alterations in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and neuropsychological disturbances were described also in the absence of liver cirrhosis. During the last years, HCV therapy has evolved from interferon-based to directly acting antiviral (DAA)-based therapy, with excellent tolerability and efficacy. Until now, few data exist on the modifications of neuropsychological symptoms before and after DAAs treatment and on the relationship of these symptoms on HRQoL. With this study we demonstrated that HCV eradication with DDAs treatment significantly improves health-related quality of life and neuropsychological symptoms.