The extent of damage on biopsy can be very helpful to patients trying to make decisions. As an excellent example, you want to know if you can wait for two years. Well, if you had a biopsy that showed minimal fibrosis, you could easily wait for two years. Cirrhosis can be stable in patients with hepatitis C for many years but as a general rule, we feel it will eventually progress and result in liver failure. 2 and 3 viruses behave better than genotype 1.
Some data suggests they progress more slowly and they respond better to treatment.
I do not believe that they broke the genotype 2 and 3 data done by age and sex. We typically think of patients with genotype 3 as being excellent candidates for treatment. Finally, you asked some questions about joint and muscle pain. A lot of individuals with hepatitis C have diffuse joint or muscle pain and they are curious if the two are related. We ve tried to look at this rigorously from time to time.