| Summary: | Introduction: Chronic hepatitis C induces hepatosteatosis, causes insulin resistance increasing tumor necrosis factor-alfa (TNF- α), and leads to the development of type 2 diabetes. This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of hepatitis C virus (HCV) and its risk factors in the diabetic patients.
Materials and Methods: Four hundred and twenty patients over 18 years of age diagnosed with diabetes in internal medicine services of our hospital were evaluated, retrospectively. Anti-HCV was evaluated by ELISA (Liaison, Diasorin, Italy) and HCVRNA was evaluated by real-time polymerase chain reaction (Ampliprep/Cobas Taqman HCV Quantitive Test, v2.0 Roche, Germany) in patients seropositive for Anti-HCV.
Results: The mean age of 420 patients was 64.7 (29-86) years and 54% (229 patient) were male. Among the patients, 92.8% (390) had type 2 diabetes and 7.2% (30) had type 1 diabetes, the mean time period for diabetes was 10.1 years (ranged between 1-43). Only one patient (0.2%) in the study having a history of surgery and transfusion was found to be seropositive for anti-HCV and confirmed by HCV-RNA test.
Conclusion: In this study, HCV was investigated in diabetic cases but no association was found between the increasing prevalance of HCV and diabetes mellitus. However, it is considered that the prevalence of HCV may increase due to the complications of HCV and some genotypes of HCV that leads to diabetes, and invasive operations such as transfusion, catheterization and hemodialysis.
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