Reply to: insulin resistance and chronic hepatitis C in non-diabetic patients

Resposta para: Resistência à insulina e hepatite crônica em pacientes não diabéticos

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Reply to: Insulin resistance and chronic hepatitis C in non-diabetic patients

Resposta para: Resistência à insulina e hepatite crônica em pacientes não diabéticos

Aecio Flavio Meirelles Souza; Fábio Heleno Lima Pace

Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Juiz de Fora, MG, Brazil

^{Correspondence to}

We appreciate the interest of Dr. Wiwanitkit in our article recently published in Journal of the Brazilian Society of Endocrinology and Metabology. According to the study results, chronic hepatitis C patients with insulin resistance (HOMA IR> 2.5) had more advanced HCV - related liver fibrosis (1). One of the issues considered by Dr. Wiwanitkit is that our results may have been influenced by the other liver diseases. However, as described in the methods section, previous antiviral treatment, co-infection with HBV or HIV, chronic renal disease, DM2, decompensated liver cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, and alcohol intake above 20 g ethanol/d were exclusion criteria. The second question issue raised by him, is that although theon the fact that it was an observational study, data were submitted to statistical analysis (univariate analysis) and results were considered statistically significant when p < 0.05. Therefore, we found possible to conclude that there was an association between IR and HCV-induced liver fibrosis. We did not analyze in our study whether insulin resistance was independently associated with HCV-induced liver fibrosis.

Disclosure: no potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.

Received on Nov/7/2011

Accepted on Nov/17/2011

• 1. Souza AF, Pace FH, Chebli JM, Ferreira LE. Insulin resistance in non-diabetic patients with chronic hepatitis C: what does it mean? Arq Bras Endocrinol Metab. 2011;55(6):412-8.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  05 Jan 2012
• Date of issue
  Dec 2011