This short article is a summary of a pilot study conducted by several physicians in Cairo, Egypt. There, M.N. Mawsouf, T.T. Tanbouli und W.I. El-Tayar had treated altogether 60 hepatitis C patients by administering ozone via major auto hemo therapy and rectal insufflations. The aim of the pilot study was to discover, if, and if yes, to what degree, ozone therapy would help to reduce the viral load in the 60 test patients. The secondary aim was to ascertain the risk factors involved in such treatments. As it was simply a pilot study no test group was evaluated for comparison.
The patients were between 34 and 65 years of age, 45 of them men, 15 women. Before the treatment series began, the physicians ran several of the standard tests for such cases, including a full liver function test and a serological test for bilharzia. Standard PCR methods were used to determine the viral load in the patients at the beginning, after 8 weeks and finally after 24 weeks of regular treatments. In the first eight weeks patients received three treatments sessions per week, in the ninth through the twenty-fourth week the number of sessions was reduced to two per week.
The pilot study ended on a much positive note, as after 6 months of ozone treatments 95% of the participants showed signs of improvement. In over 91% of the cases the viral load had decreased already after the first two months. Altogether 20% of the patients by then had become hepatitis C negative. After the full length of 6 months of treatment over 36% of all patients had turned hepatitis C negative.
The average PCR values of viral loads decreased from 1,041,354 at the beginning, through 423,215 two months later, to only 293,150 in the end. This constitutes a 59% reduction in the viral load after eight weeks of treatment, and a 72% reduction after 24 weeks. At the beginning of the study, 18 of the 60 patients showed high PCR values of above 200,000; at the end only 5 of 60 still indicated such high loads. In the final evaluation, 29 patients showed a low or very low viral load, and 22 were hepatitis C negative, in other words 51 of 60 patients displayed signs of considerable improvement, or complete healing (at least from hepatitis C). Only in 9 patients was there no or merely modest improvement.
Therefore, the study can be considered a resounding success.
The physicians who conducted it rightfully concluded that ozone therapy from now on could be regarded as a “successful, safe and cost effective method for treating hepatitis C.”