the impact of interleukin 28b gene polymorphism on the virological response to combined pegylated interferon and ribavirin therapy in chronic hcv genotype 4 infected egyptian patients using data mining analysis

conclusions: absence of the c allele was significantly associated with failure of response. the presence of c allele was associated with a favorable outcome. afp is a strong baseline predictor of hcv treatment response. a decision tree model is useful for predicting the probability of response to therapy. patients and methods: the study included 263 chronic hcv egyptian patients receiving peg-interferon and ribavirin therapy. patients were classified into 3 groups; non responders (83patients), relapsers (76patients) and sustained virological responders (104 patients). serum il 28 b was performed, dna was extracted and analyzed by direct sequencing of the snp rs 12979860 of il28b gene. results: ct, cc and tt represented 56 %, 25 % and 19% of the patients, respectively. absence of c allele (tt genotype) was significantly correlated with the early failure of response while cc was associated with sustained virological response. the decision tree showed that baseline alpha fetoprotein (afp ≤ 2.68 ng/ml) was the variable of initial split (the strongest predictor of response) confirmed by regression analysis. patients with tt genotype had the highest probability of failure of response. background: chronic hcv represents one of the common causes of chronic liver disease worldwide with egypt having the highest prevalence, namely genotype 4. interleukin il-28b gene polymorphism has been shown to relate to hcv treatment response, mainly in genotype1. objectives: we aim to evaluate the predictive power of the rs12979860 il28b snp and its protein for treatment response in genotype 4 egyptian patients by regression analysis and decision tree analysis.