Why Might Someone Not Want to Be Treated for Hepatitis C?

Hepatitis C may not cause any symptoms, especially in the early phase. In this video, family physician Sharecare Advisory Board member Daniel Spogen, MD, explains why patients may not want to be treated for hepatitis C because of some side effects.

Transcript

00:00

Hepatitis C can be very asymptomatic. By that, I mean there's not a whole lot of feeling about what's going on in your body. In fact,

00:09

your doctor might discover hepatitis C just through a normal blood test for you. And so you might not even know you have it. But as

00:17

things progress, and it's the liver gets more and more scarred over, what we call cirrhosis, then it might be a place where you need

00:24

to be treated for your hepatitis C. The hepatitis C normal treatments were interferon therapies. And interferon therapies are fraught

00:32

with a lot of side effects. Primarily, the most important one really is depression. People get severely depressed on interferon therapy.

00:40

But nowadays, with the new treatments, we might be able to avoid a lot of those side effects. And so in the future, I believe that