US researchers from the American Society for Clinical Pathology announced that they have found a way to test a woman's pap smear sample for the human papillomavirus (HPV) that can predict whether a woman will develop early signs of cervical cancer, even if the cancer doesn't actually develop for as many as 18 years after the test.
These results demonstrate the long-term benefits of first-line testing for HPV especially when set against the test currently used, a cytology test that looks for abnormally shaped cells.
"Our findings strongly reinforce the value of HPV testing as a routine part of care," said senior study author Dr Philip E Castle. "While we knew that testing for high-risk HPV can predict cervical cancer risk for a few years, it's remarkable that this predictive effect lasts for almost two decades."
The association between infection by HPV and cervical cancer is pretty well understood by scientists: A woman does need to be infected, but infection is extremely common and often requires no treatment to clear up. In other women however, the development into cervical precancer can take as many as ten years, and the development into fully invasive cancer can require another fifteen or more.
The study ran for 18 years and involved 4,000 women who underwent routine screening for HPV.
Researchers stressed that adding an HPV test to cervical cancer screening will increase detection and further, that these results suggest that women can safely go longer periods between screenings because of the average development time, and that those women who test negative for HPV will be at a very low risk for developing the signs of cervical precancer before they need to be screened again.
Source: CancerResearchUK.org
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