Living Without HepC

One of the tests my GP ordered, which led to the discovery that I have Hepatitis C, is the LFT blood test - the Liver Function Test.

After I was diagnosed - and before I started treatment, I kept track of my ALT’s as I quickly learned this was the blood test measure my doctors were using to gauge the state of my liver. I learned that ALT’s measure the amount of inflamation in the liver - and the normal range (used by my local GP’s surgery) is 0-45. (Different hospitals use different tests and therefore have different normal ranges!)

You can see they bounced around alot and got fairly high (although I understand they can and do go higher than these sorts of numbers)

These are the results of my LFT’s since I have been on treatment:

Although I have reproduced the whole report, the main items I have been tracking are again the ALT’s. You can see they were 313 at the start of treatment, dropped within a month to 30, then peaked again at the end of Jan at 67, dropping slightly to 44 at the end of February before returning to 30 at the end of March. (By the way, my hospital uses a range of 0-40 as ‘normal’.)

The following chart shows the series of items which are lowered because of the medications. Mynurse tracks how these numbers go, ensuring they do not drop below the parameters she expects because of the meds.