Acute

Acute hepatitis C refers to the first 6 months after infection with HCV. Between 60% to 70% of people infected develop no symptoms during the acute phase. In the minority of patients who experience acute phase symptoms, they are generally mild and nonspecific, and rarely lead to a specific diagnosis of hepatitis C. Symptoms of acute hepatitis C infection include decreased appetite, fatigue, abdominal pain, jaundice, itching, and flu-like symptoms.

The hepatitis C virus is usually detectable in the blood within one to three weeks after infection by PCR, and antibodies to the virus are generally detectable within 3 to 15 weeks. Spontaneous viral clearance rates are highly variable and between 10–60% of persons infected with HCV clear the virus from their bodies during the acute phase as shown by normalization in liver enzymes (alanine transaminase (ALT) & aspartate transaminase (AST)), and plasma HCV-RNA clearance (this is known as spontaneous viral clearance). However, persistent infections are common and most patients develop chronic hepatitis C, i.e., infection lasting more than 6 months.

Previous practice was to not treat acute infections to see if the person would spontaneously clear; recent studies have shown that treatment during the acute phase of genotype 1 infections has a greater than 90% success rate with half the treatment time required for chronic infections.