Burden of Disease and Cost of Chronic Hepatitis C Virus Infection in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Chronic infection with hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a major cause of cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma and liver transplantation. OBJECTIVE: To estimate the burden of HCV-related disease and costs from a Canadian perspective. METHODS: Using a system dynamic framework, the authors quantified the HCV-infected population, disease progression and costs in Canada between 1950 and 2035. Specifically, 36 hypothetical, age- and sex-defined cohorts were tracked to define HCV prevalence, complications and direct medical costs (excluding the cost of antivirals). Model assumptions and costs were extracted from the literature with an emphasis on Canadian data. No incremental increase in antiviral treatment over current levels was assumed, despite the future availability of potent antivirals. RESULTS: The estimated prevalence of viremic hepatitis C cases peaked in 2003 at 260,000 individuals (uncertainty interval 192,460 to 319,880), reached 251,990 (uncertainty interval 177,890 to 314,800) by 2013 and is expected to decline to 188,190 (uncertainty interval 124,330 to 247,200) in 2035. However, the prevalence of advanced liver disease is increasing. The peak annual number of patients with compensated cirrhosis (n=36,210), decompensated cirrhosis (n=3380), hepatocellular carcinoma (n=2220) and liver-related deaths (n=1880) are expected to occur between 2031 and 2035. During this interval, an estimated 32,460 HCV-infected individuals will die of liver-related causes. Total health care costs associated with HCV (excluding treatment) are expected to increase by 60% from 2013 until the peak in 2032, with the majority attributable to cirrhosis and its complications (81% in 2032 versus 56% in 2013). The lifetime cost for an individual with HCV infection in 2013 was estimated to be $64,694. CONCLUSIONS: Although the prevalence of HCV in Canada is decreasing, cases of advanced liver disease and health care costs continue to rise. These results will facilitate disease forecasting, resource planning and the development of rational management strategies for HCV in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".