Vitamins? The magic bullet against hepatitis C

Evaluation of: Rocco A, Compare D, Coccoli P et al. Vitamin B12 supplementation improves rates of sustained viral response in patients chronically infected with hepatitis C virus. Gut doi:10.1136/gutjnl-2012-302344 (Epub ahead of print) (2012). Vitamin B12 was first mentioned to have a role in HCV treatment approximately a decade ago, but it has not been well translated into clinical medicine. Recently, however, a randomized trial has reported significantly better response at all time-points during therapy with pegylated interferon plus ribavirin, if such therapy was combined with vitamin B12. This correlates with reports on vitamin B12 being able to inhibit HCV in vitro and a report that vitamin B12 levels were related to treatment response. If further validated, vitamin B12 is another vitamin reported to be beneficial for HCV therapy. Vitamin D had repeatedly been reported to be associated with response to HCV therapy. It will be interesting to see whether vitamins such as B12 and D will remain relevant in the light of direct antivirals.