The first patients who were enrolled into the HALT-C trial are scheduled to complete four years of maintenance therapy near the end of 2004. This provides an optimal time point at which to assess the impact of maintenance interferon therapy on portal pressure. Although an ideal study design would have been to measure portal pressure at baseline and then again after 4 years in both the control and treatment groups, measuring portal pressure at the completion of the study will still provide significant information regarding the impact of maintenance interferon therapy on portal hypertension. The number of patients enrolled into HALT-C at these two sites is substantial (nearly 400 patients) and since the control and maintenance therapy groups were well matched at the start of the study we can assume that baseline portal pressure at the time of randomization was not significantly different in the two groups. Thus, if 4 years of maintenance interferon therapy does indeed reduce portal pressure a significant difference in mean portal pressure should be observed between the two groups at the completion of the HALT-C trial.