Neurocognitive impairment & high viral load questions

[notz]

 Hello all, this is my first post. Thank you hepmag for hosting this forum, it's very kind of you.

I'm a 61 yr old male, & today will be my 10th dose of the 12 week course of Harvoni.

Has anyone else experienced impairments in memory, attention, executive function, processing speed that you attribute to Hep C? Do you think it's safe to assume the higher the viral load, the greater the chance is of this occurring?

My VL was 24 million going into day 1 of Harvoni. I've had it for 40 years, & my phenotype is 1.

Thanks in advance for your response.

[KimInTheForest]

Hi Notz, and welcome to the forums and the Harvoni journey!

The cognitive impairment you are describing is a very common consequence of Hepatitis C. Many of us have experienced it. I am happy to say that (at least in my case) it seems to finally disappear once the virus is gone and a person is cured. One of the first improvements I noticed after being cured by Harvoni last year was improved brain function, processing speed, memory, I wasn't groping for words, etc.... I had my brain back after many years of low-grade fuzziness. So I think you will be pleasantly surprised as well, once you are cured.

Good luck on your treatment journey. And don't hesitate to ask more questions!

Added Note: I meant to say, I don't know if there is a correlation between high viral load and cognitive impairment. Viral load does not correlate to outward symptoms as much as you might think with Hep C.

kim

[notz]

Hi Kim. Thank you for the warm welcome & the encouraging info! Fingers crossed & hopefully looking forward to the success of this miracle drug Harvoni!

I love seeing all the success story posts here in this great community. Thanks again!

[Scoutdoy]

Hi notz, I had a pretty high viral count myself before I took Harvoni and I questioned my hep specialist a lot regarding the effects of high viral load and hep c damage. He said that as far as they new high viral count and liver damage and other symptoms do not really have anything to do with one another. A person with 500,000 viral may be at f4 and have horrible hep c symptoms and yet someone with 13.9 million like me was F-0 with minimal symptoms. So, unfortunately I don't believe anyone knows for sure why?


Scout

[Lynn K]

Hi notz and welcome

Do you know ifyou have any liver damage especially have you been diagnosed with cirrhosis?

About 14% of patients wth early cirrhosis have symptoms of minimal hepatic encephalopathy this percentage increases with increasing levels of liver damage.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hep.510240316/abstract


Minimal hepatic encephalopathy (MHE) is defined as HE without symptoms on clinical/neurological examination, but with deficits in some cognitive areas that can only be measured by neuropsychometric testing (1). The areas with impair- ments are attention, visuospatial perception, speed of information processing, especially in the psychomotor area, fine motor skills, and short-term memory (2). MHE has a high prevalence among patients with liver cirrhosis (22% to 74%)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3317375/pdf/Dtsch_Arztebl_Int-109-0180.pdf

Hopefully you have what many with hep c refer to as brain fog and the fog will lift with cure of hep c

Good luck with treatment