الفهرس 
Introduction and aim of the workOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) has been the subject of intense research and clinical investigation as it’s major role in human disease has emerged. Up to 3% of the world’s population is infected with HCV. In Egypt, HCV had been the predominant cause of chronic liver disease. Epidemiological studies reported a high prevalence and incidence of particularly within families in rural areas. Clinical studies showed 70% to 90% of patients with chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis, or hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) had HCV infections. The dominant methods currently used for the HCV infection are the detection of circulating anti-HCV antibodies and HCV genome by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Anti-HCV immunoassays remain suboptimal for the detection of acute HCV infection because the mean period between infection and appearance of anti-HCV antibodies is 22 weeks. In contrast HCV-RNA PCR can detect the viremia of acute and chronic disease. However, the contamination potential, high costs and long time required to perform PCR limit it’s clinical application especially in developing countries. It would be necessary, therefore, to have a fast, simple and specific technique for detection and quantitation of HCV. Thus An ELISA test has also been developed to detect and quantify HCV antigen, which could offer a practical, less expensive to detect and quantify HCV in serum and plasma in the presence or absence of anti-HCV antibodies. This is allows detection of HCV during the early stage or before seroconversion. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the clinical usefulness of HCV antigen assay in comparison with detection and quantitation of HCV-RNA using the COBAS AMPLICOR HCV MONITOR version 2.0 (COBAS v2.0) as the gold standard for detection of HCV.