Does HCV Cause Diabetes?
Alan Franciscus, Editor-in-Chief It has been proven that hepatitis C causes insulin resistance, a pre-cursor to type II diabetes or diabetes mellitus (DM). However, it has not been proven that HCV causes diabetes. One way to prove that HCV causes diabetes is by studying what happens after successful treatment of HCV – the hepatitis C virus is eliminated – and observing whether or not the incidence of diabetes is lower than in the patients who did not eliminate the hepatitis C virus. This is exactly what researchers in Japan wanted to answer by conducting one of the largest clinical trials to date on diabetes and HCV. Researchers Arase and colleagues conducted a retrospective1 (looking back over time) study of 5,890 patients who were diagnosed with chronic hepatitis C in the Department of Hepatology, Toranomon Hospital, Tokyo, Japan. Of the original 5,890 patients evaluated for diabetes, 2,842 patients did not have diabetes pre-treatment (but could have had pre-diabetes) before and for
