Long Treatment Doesn’t Help Hepatitis C

Long-term drug treatment doesn’t help people who don’t respond to their first treatment for chronic hepatitis C, a study has found. Many people with this disease are treated with two drugs, peginterferon and ribavirin. The study included 1,050 people who didn’t get better with this treatment. They were randomly divided into two groups. One group took low-dose peginterferon. The other group received no further treatment. After 3½ years, tests showed no difference in liver damage between the groups. Reuters Health news service wrote about the study December 5. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.