The prevalence of HEV among non-A-C hepatitis in Qatar and efficiency of serological markers for the diagnosis of hepatitis E

Abstract Background The rapid growth of Qatar in the last two decades has attracted a large influx immigrant workers who mostly come from HEV-hyperendemic countries. Thus, we aim to investigate prevalence HEV among acute non-A-C hepatitis patients Qatar; and evaluate performance four dominant commercial serological assays for diagnosis. Methods 259 with were tested using Wantai HEV-IgM, HEV-IgG, HEV-Ag ELISA kits, MP Biomedical HEV-Total Ab kit. ALT levels RNA (viral loads) was performed Taqman AmpliCube RT-PCR kit (Mikrogen, Neuried, Germany). each assessed according results. Results HEV-RNA detected 23.1% samples. Most these HEV-RNA-positive cases belonged non-Qatari residents Indian subcontinent; India, Pakistan, etc. HEV-Ag, 5.56%, 8.65%, 32.1%, 34.2% all samples, respectively. Elevated highly correlated but not HEV-IgG Ab. Although very specific (100%), yet its sensitivity poor (36.7%). HEV-IgM demonstrated best second marker diagnosis after as jugged by overall parameters: specificity (96.2%), (71.4%), PPV (83.3%), NPP (92.7%), agreement (91.0%), Kappa-value (0.71). Conclusion Our study high virus Qatar, immigrants subcontinent. represents detecting infection, where cannot be performed.