Health-Related Quality of Life in Chronic Hepatitis C

In recent years, HCV infection has become increasingly noticeable for different reasons. On the one hand, the development of highly effective antiviral therapy has enabled the actual treatment and cure of most diagnosed patients, but on the other hand, the burden from the most severe complications, such as hepatocellular carcinoma, keeps increasing [1, 2] . A comprehensive assessment of overall outcomes would include, besides clinical hepatic and extrahepatic manifestations, patient-reported outcomes (PRO) and economic consequences. A PRO is any report of the status of a patient’s health condition that comes directly from the patient, without interpretation of the patient’s response by a clinician or anyone else. It reflects patient experience using surrogate markers such as health-related quality of life (HRQoL), functional status, perceived stigma, and work productivity [3, 4] . In this context, the study by Rei et al. [5] addresses an important topic and contributes to improve the scarce available Portuguese data. The main self-administered instruments used were the SF-12 (generic) and CLDQ (disease-specific) HRQoL questionnaires. The first studies on the effects of HCV infection on patients’ quality of life, using the short form SF-36 Health Survey, revealed that patients were polysymptomatic and