Good luck with the rest of the test results. Many of us in here request hard copies of test and procedure results, and open a medical file to track things. The definitive test for HCV is the ‘HCV RNA by PCR’ or some variant of this. This is available in either quant or qual format; the qualitative delivers a ‘pos/neg’ result, while the quantitative result is expressed as both numerical and logarithmic fashion. Either of these is very specific for infection.
If positive, you should also eventually get ‘genotyped’. This is the ‘strain’ of particular infection, and helps determine both the odds of success as well as the duration of therapy.
It’s somewhat comforting to know that liver enzymes remain normal, but keep in mind that many cases of chronic HCV infection are associated with normal liver function tests.
Typically, GT-3 infection is associated with roughly 70% treatment success; are you in Australia? GT-3 is fairly prevalent there…
Feel free to continue to ask questions and discuss options in here. For additional general HCV info, look through Janis and Friends; I’ll link you to their page for newly diagnosed:
http://janis7hepc.com/have_you_been_just_diagnosed.htm
Be sure to review the section ‘other HCV information’, located in the right hand margin as well. Additionally, here’s a page in Medhelp that will help translate many of the acronyms used in here:
http://www.medhelp.org/health_pages/Hepatitis/Common-Hepatitis-C-Acronyms/show/3?cid=64
This is also available in the lower right hand side of this page in a box titled ‘most viewed health pages’.
Best of luck and keep us informed—
Bill