ABSTRACT
Objective: Combination therapy with glecaprevir and pibrentasvir (G/P) has been shown to provide a sustained virologic response (SVR) rate of >97% in patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in the first published real-world Japanese data. However, a recently published study showed that the treatment was often discontinued in patients ≥75 years old, resulting in low SVR in intention-to-treat (ITT) analysis. Thus, our aim was to evaluate real-world data for G/P therapy in patients ≥75 years of age, the population density of which is high in “rural” regions.Patients and Methods: We conducted a multicenter study to assess the efficacy and safety of G/P therapy for chronic HCV infection, in the North Kanto area in Japan.Results: Of the 308 patients enrolled, 294 (95.5%) completed the treatment according to the protocol. In ITT and per-protocol analyses, the overall SVR12 rate was 97.1% and 99.7%, respectively. The old-aged patients group consisted of 59 participants, 56 of whom (94.9%) completed the scheduled protocol. Although old-aged patients tended to have non-SVR factors such as liver cirrhosis, history of HCC, and prior DAA therapies, the SVR12 rates in old-aged patients were 98.3% and 100% in the ITT and PP analyses, respectively. Of 308 patients enrolled, adverse events were observed in 74 patients (24.0%), with grade ≥3 events in 8 patients (2.6%). There was no significant difference in any grade and grade ≥3 adverse events between the old-aged group and the rest of the study participants. Only one patient discontinued the treatment because of adverse events.Conclusion: G/P therapy is effective and safe for old-aged patients.
ABSTRACT
We analyzed inadvertent human errors during 3-day trial examinations for the National Examination for Physicians. Sixth-year medical students sat for 2 different examinations consisting of 500 multiple-choice questions and chose either 1 or 2 correct answers. After the first examination, the students verified their errors and were provided with educational guidance to prevent inadvertent errors.1) More than half of the students made inadvertent errors during the examination.2)The errors occurred when the students solved questions or marked the answer sheets.3) Most of errors were either the selection of the wrong number of answer options (i.e., a 2-choice selection was required, but only 1 choice was selected) or the selection of choices that differed from the intended choices when the answer sheets were marked.4) After the students were taught how to avoid errors, the mean number of errors per examination per student decreased significantly from 2.1 to 1.0.5) To our knowledge, this is the first report to show the educational effectiveness of a method to decrease the rate of inadvertent errors during examinations.