Copyright
©The Author(s) 2017. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
Shear wave elastography in hepatitis C patients before and after antiviral therapy
Toshikuni Suda, Osamu Okawa, Rion Masaoka, Yoshinori Gyotoku, Naohiko Tokutomi, Yasumi Katayama, Masaya Tamano, Department of Gastroenterology, Dokkyo Medical University Koshigaya Hospital, Saitama 343-8555, Japan
Author contributions: Tamano M designed the research; Suda T, Okawa O, Masaoka R, Gyoutoku Y and Tokutomi N performed the research; Suda T and Katayama Y analyzed the data; Suda T and Tamano M wrote the paper.
Institutional review board statement: This prospective study was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of Dokkyo Medical University Koshigaya Hospital in Japan.
Informed consent statement: Written, informed consent was obtained from all participants and healthy volunteers in this study.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have no conflicts of interest with regard to this research.
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: Masaya Tamano, Professor, Department of Gastroenterology, Dokkyo Medical University Koshigaya Hospital, 2-1-50 Minami-Koshigaya, Koshigaya-shi, Saitama 343-8555, Japan. mstamano@dokkyomed.ac.jp
Telephone: +81-48-9651111 Fax: +81-48-9651169
Received: August 10, 2016
Peer-review started: August 11, 2016
First decision: September 13, 2016
Revised: September 26, 2016
Accepted: November 1, 2016
Article in press: November 2, 2016
Published online: January 8, 2017
Processing time: 148 Days and 17.4 Hours
Peer-review started: August 11, 2016
First decision: September 13, 2016
Revised: September 26, 2016
Accepted: November 1, 2016
Article in press: November 2, 2016
Published online: January 8, 2017
Processing time: 148 Days and 17.4 Hours
Core Tip
Core tip: This study is the first to compare liver stiffness in a group of hepatitis C patients in whom the virus was eliminated with antiviral therapy and a group of untreated hepatitis C patients using shear wave elastography. The liver stiffness value was higher in the untreated group than in the group in which the virus had been eliminated, which is thought to be due hepatitis activity. This study also suggests the possibility that liver stiffness measurements with shear wave elastography can be used as predictors of hepatocarcinogenesis in patients in whom the virus has been eliminated.