JID: 'Chronic Hepatitis C Virus Infection Increases Mortality From Hepatic and Extrahepatic Diseases: A Community-Based Long-Term Prospective Study'

I reference this study entitled 'Chronic Hepatitis C Virus Infection Increases
Mortality From Hepatic and Extrahepatic Diseases: A Community-Based Long-Term
Prospective Study' from the "Journal of Infectious Diseases" all the time in conversation and seem to get a good discussion going. I'm hoping for the same outcome on the Internet, thus this post. This is a HUGE cohort study from China (n = 23,820). Grant it, the 'n' representative of the HCV seropositive population is rather small (1095) compared to the seronegative population (19,636), and the population is of Eastern descent, but even given the sampling and ethnic disparity, there are compelling conclusions here which bear further study. Most notably, that having replicating Hepatitis C virus results in not only greater hepatic-related mortality, but extra-hepatic as well. Replicating virus = inflammation of all types. This gives compelling fuel to treatment advocates arguments that, barring contraindications and other special cases, Hepatitis C-positive patients should be considered for treatment now vs 'warehousing' for drugs that might/might not make it to market in the future. Hopefully further prospective and retrospective data based on the conclusions here will shed more light on this controversial subject.