PREVALENCE AND CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HEPATITIS G VIRUS INFECTION IN ADULT BETA‐THALASSAEMIA MAJOR PATIENTS

The risk of polytransfused patients for hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is likely to extend to another recently identified member of the Flaviviridae, hepatitis G virus (HGV). We investigated the prevalence of HGV in 40 adult Italian patients with transfusion-dependent thalassaemia and evaluated the clinical significance of HGV infection. HGV-RNA was detected in 9/40 patients (22.5%). HGV infection was significantly associated with HCV viraemia (P = 0.0012), with all patients positive for HGV being also viraemic for HCV. Overall, the clinical picture of patients with HCV/HGV co-infection was not different from that of patients with isolated HCV. However, patients co-infected with both viruses had lower values of alanine-transferase (P = 0.035) and a lower titre of HCV viraemia (P = 0.042) in the absence of other evident factors which could influence the clinical expression of HCV infection. In conclusion, HGV is highly prevalent among Italian polytransfused patients. No evidence of a clinically significant pathogenic role for HGV in liver disease could be found in these patients. In a subset of cases a possible interference of HGV with HCV infection was observed.