Objective To study the hepatitis C virus specific immune responses in anti - HCV positive patientswithout hepatitis C viremia. Methods 15 anti- HCV positive patients without hepatitis C viremia, 15 patientswith chronic HCV infection and 1 5 normal controls were selected for this study. The T cell responses, NK cell(natu-ral killer cells)activity Cytokine production and HCV specific antibodies were detected by MTT, LDH release andELISA. Results Our study showed that the T cell proliferative reaction of patients without hepatitis C viremia wassignificantly higher than that of patients with chronic HCV infection and normal controls and the T cell response forHCV core antigen were higher than NS3 and NS4, but there was no significant proliferative response to NS5 anti-gen. We also found that there were no differences in anti - HCV antibody production and NK cell activity betweenthe two groups and the level of IFN - γin patients without hepatitis C viremia was higher than that in patients withrersistent HCV infection. Conclusion There are a lot of advantageous changes of HCV specific humoral and cel-lular immume response in anti - HCV positive patients without hepatitis C viremia, these immune responses may playa role in clearance of HCV.