Statistics

Statistics

It's often portrayed as a virus causing an incurable disease--a killer with few outward warning signs that lurks inside the body and slowly ravages the liver.

For some, the hepatitis C virus (HCV) is deadly, but for most of the nearly 4 million Americans infected with the virus, it is not life-threatening.

"Some cases are mild, and people can go through their whole lives and never have a problem," says Leonard Seeff, M.D., a hepatologist at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)." For others who develop severe liver disease, it is a terribly serious problem."

HCV is responsible for 8,000 to 10,000 deaths per year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The virus is spread mainly through contact with the blood of an infected person. Most people don't know they carry the virus because they have either no symptoms or vague ones--extreme tiredness is the most common. Other common symptoms are "flu-like": muscle and joint pain, nausea, poor appetite, and mild stomach pain.

Only about 15 percent of those infected with HCV have a short-term infection that goes away by itself and never returns. The other 85 percent become chronically infected, meaning the virus stays in the liver, replicates, and may slowly attack the organ over a period of decades.

Despite many years of chronic infection, the majority of people infected with HCV do not develop severe liver disease, and some may not need treatment, says William Schwieterman, M.D., chief of the immunology and infectious diseases branch in the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). Most studies report that cirrhosis (advanced liver scarring) develops in 10 percent to 20 percent of people with chronic HCV infection over a period of 20 to 30 years. Liver cancer develops in 1 percent to 5 percent.

Those who do need treatment have more and better therapies today than were available just a few years ago. Although treatments come with the risk of serious side effects, many individuals with HCV infection are benefiting from them.

The following are the latest statistics available from the National Center for Health Statistics, the American Liver Foundation, and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS):

• Cirrhosis and other chronic liver diseases are common disease-related causes of death in the US. Over20,353 people in the US die each year from chronic liver disease and cirrhosis.
• The vast majority of cases of cirrhosis could be prevented by eliminating alcohol abuse.
• Approximately 4 million people in the US are chronically infected with the hepatitis C virus.
• Between 10,000 and 12,000 people die of hepatitis C annually in the US.
• Hepatitis B kills around 5,000 people in the US annually, and 73,000 are newly infected each year.