The Journal of Infectious Diseases has posted a prospective study showing that 40% of a group of college-aged women in Quebec had human papillomavirus (HPV) infections within 2 years of starting a heterosexual relationship.
A McGill University-led research team tested vaginal samples from 502 women aged 18 to 24 years self-collected at six university clinic visits over 2 years for 36 types of HPV from 2005 to 2011. The women, who had begun a sexual relationship with a man within the past 6 months, also completed questionnaires on sociodemographic factors and sexual behavior.
Persistent HPV infections cause most precancerous cervical lesions and cancers. While most infections in young women resolve, some persist, and a large proportion of “incident” cases in older women are reactivations of previous infections, the study authors said.
Cervical cancer highly preventable with HPV vaccine
By 2 years, new-onset HPV infections were detected in 40.4% of the women. Subgenus 1 infections (43.4%), subgenus 2 (47.1%), and subgenus 3 (46.6%) infections cleared at similar rates per 1,000 infection-months, and infections present at baseline cleared at comparable rates as incident infections.
HPV-level analyses did not clearly indicate that high oncogenic risk subgenus 2 infections persist longer than their low oncogenic risk subgenera 1 and 3 counterparts.
“Our analyses of individual HPV types and our HPV-level group analyses provide descriptive natural history estimates for cervical cancer prevention planning,” the researchers wrote. “HPV-level analyses did not clearly indicate that high oncogenic risk subgenus 2 infections persist longer than their low oncogenic risk subgenera 1 and 3 counterparts.”
They noted that cervical cancer, which made up 3.1% of the global cancer burden in 2020, is highly preventable through the use of the HPV vaccine introduced in 2006. The vaccine “prevents infection with HPV types found in 89.5% of invasive cervical cancers, and molecular HPV testing is an efficacious screening strategy,” they wrote.