Hepatitis C drugs are less effective in black patients
By Nathan Seppa
Standard drugs for hepatitis C virus are less likely to knock out the infection in black patients than in whites, finds a study in the May 27 New England Journal of Medicine.
Hepatitis C is a liver ailment that afflicts roughly 4 million people in the United States. It often goes unnoticed until it causes cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer.
Researchers gave two antiviral drugs, peginterferon alpha-2b and ribavirin, for 11 months, to 81 black patients and 79 white, non-Hispanic patients with hepatitis C. At the end of the treatment, nearly 75 percent of the white patients no longer had hepatitis C virus detectable in their blood, whereas only 25 percent of the black patients showed no virus.