Introduction
The hepatitis C virus triggers dangerous inflammation of the liver, which is usually chronic and progressive. In Germany about 0.3% of the population is infected with hepatitis C. Due to early diagnoses, good results are possible today with modern treatment options. In many cases, the disease can be cured before it becomes chronic.
In diagnostics, so-called “addiction tests” and “confirmatory tests” have proven successful. Diagnostic tests should always be very sensitive and at the same time very specific. This means that the tests are highly likely to be positive in the presence of a disease, but also provide reliable negative results in the absence of the disease.
What types of hepatitis C tests are available?
In the diagnosis of hepatitis C, two tests are used clinically, an addiction test and a confirmatory test.
- The screening test is also called anti-HCV antibody test. Here the antibodies formed by the body against the hepatitis C virus are sought.
About 7-8 weeks after infection, the body produces antibodies against the virus, which can be detected with a very high degree of certainty in this test procedure. The screening test is suitable as an initial test if there is a suspicion of infection. If the test is positive, however, this does not necessarily mean that the patient is ill.
Even if the disease is not present, the test can be positive in some cases.
- A confirmation test must then be performed. In this test the so-called “HCV-RNA” is determined. This in turn has a high specificity, which means that it almost never turns out positive if no disease is present.
In this test, the direct genetic material of the hepatitis virus is determined, which not only confirms the infection, but also allows the genotype and quantity of virus in the body to be determined. The genotype plays a role especially in therapy planning, as the drugs act differently on different genotypes.
- Today, rapid tests are also being developed to simplify the diagnosis of hepatitis C virus infection. These offer the possibility to detect the infection from venous blood, finger blood or saliva.
New studies show that the rapid tests already have high success rates in diagnostics. However, they have not yet become established in everyday clinical practice.
In the field of hepatitis C virus diagnostics, rapid tests are currently being developed to enable the first suspected diagnoses in clinical routine before the lengthy laboratory procedures. Similar rapid tests already exist in HIV diagnostics and are used clinically. The advantage of the rapid tests is the duration of 20 minutes per test procedure. The collection of the sample material is also an advantage, since it can be obtained not only by intravenous blood collection, but also by a drop of blood from the fingertip or by saliva.
