ArticleThe Korean journal of internal medicine2023
The diagnostic significance of hepatitis C virus antibody levels for chronic hepatitis C virus infection.
Article in The Korean journal of internal medicine, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Revisiting Anti-HCV Seropositivity: Signal Intensity, Diagnostic Uncertainty, and the Limitations of Fixed Cut-Offs.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction in Detecting Active Hepatitis C Virus Infection: A Retrospective Analysis.Cureus · 2026Article
- Detection of anti-HCV antibodies in the clinical classification and epidemiological surveillance of HCV infection.Molecular biology reports · 2025Review
- Anti-hepatitis C virus threshold value in predicting hepatitis C virus viremia in hemodialysis patients.Revista da Associacao Medica Brasileira (1992) · 2025Article
- Glycylglycine promotes the solubility and antigenic utility of recombinant HCV structural proteins in a point-of-care immunoassay for detection of active viremia.Microbial cell factories · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
BACKGROUND/
aimsAlthough anti-hepatitis C virus (HCV) assay is widely used to screen for HCV infection, it has a high false-positive (FP) rate in low-risk populations. We investigated the accuracy of anti-HCV signal-to-cutoff (S/CO) ratio to distinguish true-positive (TP) from FP HCV infection.
methodsWe retrospectively analyzed 77,571 patients with anti-HCV results. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of anti-HCV S/CO ratio in anti-HCV positive patients.
resultsOverall, 1,126 patients tested anti-HCV positive; 34.7% of patients were FP based on HCV RNA and/or recombinant immunoblot assay (RIBA) results. The age and sex-adjusted anti-HCV prevalence was 1.22%. We identified significant differences in serum aspartate transaminase and alanine transaminase levels, anti-HCV S/CO ratio, and RIBA results between groups (viremia vs. non-viremia, TP vs. FP). Using ROC curves, the optimal cutoff values of anti-HCV S/CO ratio for HCV viremia and TP were 8 and 5, respectively. The area under the ROC curve, sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values were 0.970 (95% CI, 0.959-0.982, p < 0.001), 99.7%, 87.5%, 87.4%, and 99.7%, respectively, for predicting HCV viremia at an anti-HCV S/CO ratio of 8 and 0.987 (95% CI, 0.980-0.994, p < 0.001), 95.3%, 94.7%, 97.1%, and 91.4%, respectively, for TP HCV infection at an anti-HCV S/CO ratio of 5. No patients with HCV viremia had an anti-HCV S/CO ratio below 5.
conclusionThe anti-HCV S/CO ratio is highly accurate for discriminating TP from FP HCV infection and should be considered when diagnosing HCV infections.
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