Clinical Trial to Evaluate the Acceptance and Viability of Three Strategies in Birth Cohort Hepatitis C Screening

This is a prospective, randomized, study in which subjects of four different health areas will be invited to participate in three different screening strategies for HCV.

Hepatologists from a tertiary care hospital and general practitioners from four health areas will participate coordinating the study, to first select potential candidates for the study (subjects between 50 and 70 years old of the four areas) and secondly, randomize and include 150 subjects of each area into the three strategies (50 subjects each). The strategies include offering by letter screening at the local primary care center for HCV by using dried blood spot (DBS) testing, screening for HCV and colorectal cancer (CCR) using faecal occult test (FOT) at the primary care center, and self-testing at home-collection with DBS and FOT to be performed by the subject and sent by postal office. Subjects will receive an invitation and informative letter and will be ask to sign the informed consent to participate.

In all the planned strategies subjects will be asked to complete a questionnaire that includes demographic variables. After two months of sending the letters without response, researchers will contact subjects by phone to complete a survey to confirm they received the letter and asking for factors of non-participation.

The hypothesis of the study is that subjects in the risk of having HCV are willing to be screened for HCV infection if offered and that the acceptance will be improved if attached to CCR screening and even higher if the tests are offered to be self-screened.

For the present study, a 15% improvement in the participation (acceptance of the screening strategy) was hypothesized in the group of patients receiving the strategy 2 (and 3) compared to the strategy 1. Taking into account a power of 80%, alpha error of 5% and losses of 20% will require 200 patients per group.