Ancestry and Risk of Hepatic Fibrosis and Inflammation in Patients With HCV Infection

Abstract

Worldwide, ∼184 million people have chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection.¹ Persistent racial disparities in outcomes are observed among HCV-infected patients. Hispanic patients with chronic HCV are more likely than non-Hispanic white (NHW) patients to develop advanced hepatic fibrosis and inflammation.^2,3 Conversely, black patients with HCV infection are at lowest risk. The factors that contribute to this racial disparity are multifactorial, including lifestyle, genetics, and medical care. Limited data in other diseases suggest that genetic ancestry determined using ancestry-informative markers (AIMs) may help explain racial and ethnic differences in disease risk or severity.⁴ AIMs are sets of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that determine a person's ancestral continent of origin and the genetic ancestry proportions assigned to each individual serves as a proxy for his or her genetic ancestral background. We examined the risk of hepatic fibrosis and inflammation in HCV-infected patients according to both genetic ancestry and self-reported race/ethnicity.