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Abstract

Background Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection affects diverse populations such as people who inject drugs (PWID), 'baby boomers' (BB’s), gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (gbMSM), and immigrants from HCV endemic regions. Assessing patterns of shared characteristics, the burden of syndemics, and the likelihood of treatment uptake among subpopulations may facilitate targeted program planning. Methods The BC Hepatitis Testers Cohort includes all HCV cases identified in BC from 1990 to 2015 followed up to 2018 and linked with data on medical visits, emergency department visits, hospitalizations, cancers, prescription drugs, and deaths. Latent Class Analysis was used to group people diagnosed with HCV according to shared characteristics previously shown to be related to HCV acquisition, transmission, retention in care and/or treatment uptake. Models were fitted step-wise, with the best fitting model chosen based on fit statistics, epidemiological meaningfulness, and maximisation of posterior probability for class assignment. Latent class groups were named based on defining characteristics and analysed for their association with treatment uptake (based on first treatment course). Results The best fitting latent class model had six groups, with names and characteristics as follows: Younger PWID (n=11,563): people born >1974, mental illness, material deprivation, recent injection drug use (IDU). Older PWID (n=15,266): past IDU, HIV, HBV, TB coinfections, alcohol misuse. gbMSM (n=12,698): gbMSM, material privilege, no liver disease. People of Asian Backgrounds (n=4,718): East/South Asians, people born