Pruritus as a symptom of hepatitis C.

Recent isolation, cloning, and sequencing of the hepatitis C genome, which has led to the development of an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, has produced increasing recognition of a hepatic disease that frequently leads to potentially lethal, chronic active hepatitis. We describe four patients who had pruritus or in whom pruritus developed as a consequence of hepatitis C. The symptom of pruritus should be added to a growing list of cutaneous manifestations of this newly recognized inflammatory viral hepatitis.