Viral Causation May Associate With Chronic Diseases.(hepatitis C and other viruses may be linked with chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes)

2001 OCT 25 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Sonia Nichols, senior medical writer - Researchers at the Richard Freeman Research Institute in New Orleans have performed several studies demonstrating the possibility of a link between viruses like hepatitis C with chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes.

"Cross-sectional studies performed worldwide have shown that hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is linked with type 2 diabetes, but these endocrine and liver diseases have an insidious onset, and it has been difficult to establish that patients acquire HCV infection before the development of diabetes," remarked Andrew Mason of the New Orleans, Louisiana research facility.

Mason believes small animal models and more laboratory analysis will be needed in order to confirm that causation. Meanwhile, in vitro studies and clinical trials performed by Mason's group have shown a link between viral infection and another autoimmune disease, called primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), that affects the liver and occurs most often in women.

"We have developed an in vitro model to study the viral induction of PBC based on the phenotype of the diseased biliary epithelial cells," Mason described in the Journal of Nutrition.

Their model showed that when normal biliary epithelial cells were cocultured with the lymph nodes of patients with disease, those cells acquired PBC phenotypes, but remained unchanged when coculured with the lymph nodes of patients with ...