ABSTRACT
Background: Viral infection has been implicated in the pathogenesis of bone marrow failure. We designed this study to explore the influence of chronic HCV infection on the bone marrow status in patients withliver cirrhosis presenting with peripheral blood cytopenias
Patients and Methods: The present study was conducted on 70 patients with different grades of liver cirrhosis based on Child-Pugh scoringsystem . They were categorized into those positive for HCV infection [50patients] and those without [20 patients]based on assay of anti-HCV anti-bodies and qualitative PCR for HCV-RNA. Complete blood count and bonemarrow examination have been performed to all studied patients
Results: Normal bone marrow cellularity was more evident in pa-tients without HCV infection. However, hypercellular bone marrow wasmore evident in patients with positive HCV infection .Furthermore, no significant changes in different bone marrow elements in patients with posi-tive HCV infection were demonstrated when compared to patients withnegative HCV infection [P<0.05]
Conclusion: HCV infection has no evident direct suppressive effecton bone marrow elements in cirrhotic patients presenting with mono, biorpancytopenia. Understanding the pathogenetic mechanism of cytopeniasin cirrhotic patients is important to improve the management strategy andoutcome