The main goals of treating cirrhotic patients with antiviral therapy are to prevent the complications of the disease, to halt disease progression or allow for the regression of cirrhosis, and to attain sustained viral clearance in order to prevent reinfection in the graft in patients undergoing LT. SVR in patients with Child-Pugh (CP) class A cirrhosis has improved from 5% with interferon monotherapy to 50% with pegylated interferon alfa (PegIFN) + ribavirin (RBV) in genotype 1 (Everson 2005).
The safety of combination therapy in cirrhotics is a major concern. Bone marrow suppression by administration of either standard or PegIFN alfa leads to significant decrease in all three lineages of the hematopoietic system (Iacobellis 2008). However, erythropoietic agents are effective in treating anemia, preventing RBV dose reduction, improving patients