Approximately 5-10% of cases of cirrhosis and other chronic liver diseases are caused by chronic viral hepatitis B. Markers of the activity of such diseases are HBeAg and viral DNA in the blood serum.
Unlike serological methods for diagnosing viral hepatitis C, which detect antibodies to HCV, PCR allows one to detect the presence of HCV RNA directly and quantitatively express its concentration in the test material.
PCR is one of the methods of DNA diagnostics that allows increasing the number of copies of the detected region of the genome (DNA) of bacteria or viruses millions of times using the enzyme DNA polymerase.
