ABSTRACT
Objective@#To investigate hepatitis C virus(HCV)genotyping and the serum HCV-RNA concentration in patients infected with different HCV genotypes and to provide information for evaluation of disease condition and anti-viral treatment efficacy.@*Methods@#A total of 60 anti-HCV positive serum samples were collected before antiviral treatment. RT-PCR was performed for the 5′ non-cording region and was followed by nucleotide sequencing for HCV genotyping. Meanwhile, serum HCV-RNA concentration was detected by quantitative PCR. SPSS21.0 and Graphpad Prism 5.0 software were used for data analysis. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used for comparison among multi-groups and the t-test was used for comparison between two groups.@*Results@#The frequencies of HCV genotypes 1b, 3a, 1a and 2a were 48.3% (29/60), 23.3% (14/60), 16.7% (10/60) and 10% (6/60), respectively. And, there is one subtype 2c was detected in this study. The mean serum viral concentration with standard deviation of HCV in genotype 1a, 1b, 2a, and 3 a were 5.46±1.19, 6.22±0.78, 5.47±0.65, and 5.38±0.98 log10 (IU/ml) respectively.@*Conclusions@#The infection rate of HCV genotype 1 was significantly higher than that of genotype 2 and 3 (P<0.01). The statistical analysis showed the serum HCV-RNA concentration in patients with subtype 1b was significantly higher than that of the subtype group 1 a, 2 a, and 3 a (P<0.05). The study of the relationship between HCV genotypes and the serum HCV-RNA concentration may contribute to anti-viral treatment prescription for hepatitis C patients.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: Noninvasive prenatal detection of trisomy 21 (T21) has been achieved by measuring the ratio of two alleles of a single nucleotide polymorphism in circulating placenta specific 4 (PLAC4) mRNA in maternal plasma with a few assays in recent years. Our research is to explore the variations of PLAC4 mRNA expression level in maternal plasma with normal pregnancies in second trimester, which can provide pregnant women deeper insights with suitable detection period for the non-invasive prenatal detection of T21. METHODS: We measured a serial plasma PLAC4 mRNA concentrations weekly from the same 25 singleton normal pregnant women. We recruited maternal plasma samples from 45 singleton pregnant women, comprising of 25 euploid pregnancies (control group; range, 17 to 21 weeks) and 20 T21 pregnancies (T21 group; range, 19 to 24 weeks). With the application of reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, we achieved an insight of PLAC4 mRNA expression levels in maternal plasma during second trimester with euploid pregnancies. RESULTS: Among the control group, the levels of PLAC4 mRNA expression in the gestation of 17 to 18 weeks were significantly less than those in the gestation of 18 to 21 weeks (P0.05). CONCLUSION: The PLAC4 mRNA showed a higher level of expression in the gestation of 18 to 21 weeks with an euploid pregnancy of pregnant women. We also found that there was no significant difference in plasma PLAC4 mRNA concentration between the normal and the T21 pregnancies in second trimester.