OBJECTIVES: CHC treatment has been evaluated for its efficacy (SVR) and long-term effects in terms of reducing disease progression to advanced stages, long-term improvement on quality of life, and reduction of healthcare costs. The objective is to assess the impact of SVR in CHC patients on lifetime life years (LY) and QALY based on published cost-utility analyses. METHODS: A systematic literature review identified publications reporting the cost-effectiveness of antiviral therapies in CHC (November 2009). PubMed, the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and health technology assessment (HTA) reports were searched. We included all cost-effectiveness studies based on a Markov model reporting lifetime LYs and QALYs. All of these published studies assumed that patients in the comparison groups have the same attributes such as starting age, disease states, disease progression probabilities, mortality, and utilities associated with each health state, etc. We did a back calculation on the LYs and QALYs associated with SVR and non-SVR because that SVR difference is the only difference between the two comparators for the lifetime QALY and LY differences in the final reported incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) results. RESULTS: A total of 893 unique references were retrieved and 80 articles met the inclusion criteria. Among them, 46 reported for each comparator the SVR rate, LYs and QALYs. Compared to non-SVR status, SVR was consistently associated with more LYs (24.5 ranging from 15.9 to 36.5 vs. 21.2 ranging from 14.2 to 32.7) and QALYs (19.2 ranging from 10.1 to 45.0 vs. 15.4 ranging from 9.9 to 30.7). This trend was consistent across all studies where this analysis is feasible (N=40). CONCLUSIONS: In this literature review, SVR is associated with longer life expectancy and QALYs than non-SVR. It is important to account for these lifetime benefits when the values of an antiviral treatment in CHC are being evaluated.