View clinical trials related to Hepatitis.
Filter by:After a liver transplant, the hepatitis C virus (which destroyed one's own liver) eventually comes back. In many patients, this will eventually cause the loss of the new liver and can also confuse the doctors taking care of them because it is hard to tell the difference between one's body rejecting the new liver and hepatitis. This can cause serious treatment errors that can lead to more severe hepatitis or to rejection of the liver. Some of the drugs used to prevent rejection of one's new liver can cause the hepatitis to come back in a more severe form. This is especially true for the drugs known as corticosteroids. Right now, the only effective treatment against hepatitis C is a combination of two drugs called interferon and ribavirin. These drugs act by strengthening one's immune system to fight the virus and by directly reducing the reproduction of the virus. Because the treatment with these drugs is associated with many side effects, there is little experience with treating patients after liver transplantation with them. In the investigators' transplant program, they have decided to treat all patients with hepatitis C as early as possible after transplantation and to follow them closely for the development of hepatitis and side effects of the treatment. The investigators treat one's hepatitis as early as possible, before any actual damage has occurred in the new liver. This approach has been tried before but it has been hard to tell if it has worked or not. The main reason for failure was that many patients could not complete the treatment due to side effects. The investigators' purpose is to treat those side effects aggressively so that most patients can complete the treatment course. The purpose of this study is to collect all the data regarding the investigators' treatment protocol so that they will be able to learn if this form of treatment is beneficial. The study includes performing liver biopsies at scheduled times after one's liver transplant and for scheduled blood tests to see how much virus is still in the blood. If patients show signs that they are not responding to treatment they will be removed from the study.
The purpose of the study is to investigate the immune response to hepatitis C virus to determine why some people clear the virus and others develop chronic infection. Changes in immune response once hepatitis C therapy is begun will also be examined. If patients are also HIV+, the effect of antiretroviral therapy on the recovery of hepatitis C immunity will be investigated.
This study will evaluate the drug telbivudine (LdT) for treatment of hepatitis B virus (HBV) in HIV infected patients. Patients will take telbivudine alone for 24 weeks, add anti-HIV drugs for 24 weeks, then stop taking telbivudine while continuing their anti-HIV drug regimen. To enroll in this study, patients must not be taking any anti-HIV drugs and cannot have taken more than 31 days of treatment with lamivudine (3TC), protease inhibitors (PIs), or nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs).
This study will investigate the safety and effectiveness of using adefovir dipivoxil (ADV), pegylated interferon (PEG-INF), and ribavirin (RBV) in patients triple-infected with hepatitis B virus (HBV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), and HIV. Patients in this study must be taking lamivudine (3TC).