A Cork researcher has won the main prize in the inaugural Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland awards for excellence in clinical research.
Educational bursaries, worth £27,000, were presented in Dublin to the 12 category winners and to Dr Elizabeth Kenny-Walsh.
Her paper, Clinical Outcomes after Hepatitis C Infection from Contaminated Anti-D Immune Globulin, looked at the consequences of the 1994 findings that batches of anti-D were contaminated with the hepatitis C virus from a single infected blood donor.
A national screening programme was subsequently set up for all women who had received the product between 1970 and 1994. The award-winning research described the results of screening 62,667 women for hepatitis C.
Dr Kenny-Walsh and the Irish Hepatology Research Group found that 704 women had evidence of past infection with the virus. When a more sophisticated test was carried out to establish the presence of hepatitis C, 390 women were found to have the virus.
Of these, 376 had a comprehensive medical evaluation which, for the first time, recorded the outcome of bloodborne hepatitis C infection.
The results showed that women had been infected with hepatitis C for approximately 17 years at the time of screening.
Liver biopsies showed some degree of inflammation in 98 per cent, although in most cases the inflammatory changes were either slight (41 per cent) or moderate (52 per cent). However, 2 per cent had evidence of definite cirrhosis, a non-reversible destruction of the liver cells.
Dr Kenny-Walsh said this low figure for cirrhosis was a welcome discovery as previous research would have predicted a cirrhosis rate of 18 per cent in a group of patients infected for 17 years.
The finding also suggests that women infected with the Type I B sub-type of the virus may have a lower mortality rate than other sub-types which have been previously researched.
The study is also helpful in defining the level and nature of symptoms experienced by those with the virus.
Some 81 per cent of the women studied reported at least one symptom including:
66 per cent who reported profound fatigue.
38 per cent with myalgia (muscle pain) or arthalgia (joint pain).
16 per cent experienced anxiety or depression.
6 per cent had right-sided abdominal pain.
5 per cent had skin rashes.
"This is a significant level of morbidity, and I think the women felt that this had been understated in the past and so felt justified by our findings," Dr Kenny-Walsh said.
From a scientific perspective, she said, the research showed a clinical and pathological pattern that was consistent for Type I B of the disease.
Dr Kenny-Walsh's work has made a major contribution to the understanding of how infection with the hepatitis C virus impacts on human health over a prolonged period of time.
"We will be monitoring this group of women for the rest of their lives," she said.
The RAMI prize money will be used to further her hepatitis C research at Cork University Hospital.