Cost-Effective Use of Interferon-α in Hepatitis CHow Can We Predict Who Will Respond?

Increasing the dosage and duration of treatment seems to be a practical approach to improving the outcome of interferon-α therapy in patients with chronic hepatitis C. However, high dosage regimens are expensive and less well tolerated. Another approach that has been proposed for optimising treatment of hepatitis C is to refine the indications for treatment on the basis of predictors of treatment outcome. The set of parameters that are associated with an increased likelihood of responding to the therapy include patient age, disease duration, severity of the disease, pretreatment viraemia and viral genotype. These variables have different statistical power, and some of them are not independent predictors of treatment outcome. The predictive power of these variables should be validated prospectively before applying them to use in clinical practice.