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Prevalence and association of hepatitis C virus infection with different types of lymphoma
Iqbal, T., Mahale, P., Turturro, F., Kyvernitakis, A., & Torres, H. A. (2016). Prevalence and association of hepatitis C virus infection with different types of lymphoma. International Journal of Cancer, 138(4), 1035-1037. https://doi.org/10.1002/ijc.29845
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is the most common blood-borne infection in the United States, affecting about 4.1 million people (1.6%) of the US population.1 Chronic HCV infection has been associated with extrahepatic hematological manifestations such as mixed cryoglobulinemia and lymphoma.2 Several reports support an association of HCV infection with the development of non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHLs).3, 4 Furthermore, eradication of the chronic HCV infection has been correlated with regression of certain NHLs.5 However, studies of patients with HCV infection and specific histological types of NHL and Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) are limited. We thus sought to determine the prevalence of HCV seropositivity in patients with different subtypes of NHL and HL and its association with these subtypes.
We conducted a case–control study, abstracting data from the electronic medical records of cancer patients screened for HCV antibodies (anti-HCV) at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center from June 2004 to May 2014. HCV cases were defined as patients who tested positive for anti-HCV. Among this group, patients with available information on detectable HCV-RNA or history of HCV infection treatment were considered to be chronically infected with HCV. NHL and HL cases were classified for subtype-specific analysis using the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification codes and nested classification by the International Lymphoma Epidemiology Consortium Pathology Working Group.6 Controls were cancer patients without lymphoma and hepatocellular carcinoma who were screened for anti-HCV during the same period. The χ2 test was used to calculate prevalence of HCV-seropositivity and the odds ratio (OR) as a measure of association with lymphoma. Bonferroni correction was performed to adjust p values, reducing false-positive rates owing to multiple testing. Hence, the p value for statistical significance was 0.0036. All hypothesis testing was two-sided. Statistical analyses were conducted using the Stata/IC software program (version 11.0; StataCorp, College Station, TX). The study was approved by the MD Anderson Institutional Review Board.