Welcome to the HCV Advocate’s AASLD Conference coverage. In an effort to best serve our readership, we will post all the important and interesting abstracts about HCV from the conference. While attending the conference, we will update any abstracts that we personally cover at the conference. The updated abstracts will be marked with the date that they have been updated and posted. The other abstracts posted to the web site are HCV related abstracts posted to www.aasld.org that we have not been able to report on or update.

To locate specific abstracts for each topic below, click on the links.

Please click here to view our fact sheet on reading and understanding an abstract.

Thank You,

Alan Franciscus

Editor-in-Chief

Hepatitis C

· Diagnostic Tools: Various tests to diagnose and manage hepatitis C including various biochemical marker, imaging, liver biopsy for grading/staging liver disease and HCV RNA (viral load) tests.

· Disease Progression: Various factors that influence HCV disease progression including steatosis, obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, race/ethnicity, and general studies on disease progression.

· Epidemiology and Transmission Issues: Studies that look at populations infected with hepatitis C as well as the transmission risk factors.

· Experimental Therapies: New treatments for hepatitis C including pre-clinical development that have not yet been studied in humans, and various drugs that are in phase I, II and III development to treat hepatitis C.

· HCV Treatment: The current treatments for hepatitis C, including outcomes, side effects and treatment of various HCV populations.

· HIV and Hepatitis C Coinfection: Disease progression, epidemiology, and liver transplantation.

· Liver Transplantation: Information on allocation of livers, recurrent HCV after transplantation, treatment of HCV before and after liver transplantation, post transplantation disease progression, and long term outcomes after liver transplantation