Background: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection and chronic kidney disease (CKD) have high prevalences in Taiwan\r\nand worldwide, but the role of HCV infection in causing CKD remains uncertain. This cohort study aimed to explore\r\nthis association.\r\nMethods: This nationwide cohort study examined the association of HCV with CKD by analysis of sampled claims\r\ndata from Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database from 1998 to 2004. ICD-9 diagnosis codes were\r\nused to identify diseases. We extracted data of 3182 subjects who had newly identified HCV infection and no\r\ntraditional CKD risk factors and data of randomly selected 12728 matched HCV-uninfected control subjects. Each\r\nsubject was tracked for 6 years from the index date to identify incident CKD cases. Cox proportional hazard\r\nregression was used to determine the risk of CKD in the HCV-infected and control groups.\r\nResults: The mean follow-up durations were 5.88 years and 5.92 years for the HCV-infected and control groups,\r\nrespectively. Among the sample of 15910 subjects, 251 subjects (1.6%) developed CKD during the 6-year follow-up\r\nperiod, 64 subjects (2.0%) from the HCV-infected group and 187 subjects (1.5%) from the control group. The incidence\r\nrate of CKD was significantly higher in the HCV-infected group than in the control group (3.42 vs. 2.48 per 1000\r\nperson-years, p = 0.02). Multivariate analysis indicated that the HCV-infected group had significantly greater risk for CKD\r\n(adjusted hazard ratio: 1.75, 95% CI: 1.25-2.43, p = 0.0009). This relationship also held for a comparison of HCV-infected\r\nand HCV-uninfected subjects who were younger than 70 years and had none of traditional CKD risk factors.\r\nConclusions: HCV infection is associated with increased risk for CKD beyond the well-known traditional CKD risk factors.\r\nHCV patients should be informed of their increased risk for development of CKD and should be more closely monitored
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