Cervical screening for women aged below 24 has mixed results – and testing for the HPV virus may improve it, experts report today.
Researchers from Bart’s and The London School of Medicine, UK, believe that screening has "little or no impact" on cancer rates for women up to age 30.
The issue has been controversial in Britain following the death of a young reality TV star Jade Goody from the disease.
On the website of the British Medical Journal, Professor Peter Sasieni and colleges report on their study of 4,012 women aged 20 to 69 years with cervical cancer, who were compared against similar women without cancer.
Results showed no evidence that screening women aged 22 to 24 reduced the rate of cervical cancer at ages 25 to 29.
Screening was linked with a 60 per cent reduction in cancers among women aged 40, increasing to 80 per cent at age 64, and was particularly effective in preventing advanced stage cancers.
They conclude that uncertainly still exists regarding the impact of cervical screening in women under age 30. "These data should help policy makers balance the impact of screening on cancer rates against its harms," they conclude.
In a second study, Dr Philip Castle of the National Cancer Institute, Maryland, USA, and colleagues evaluated the rate of pre-cancerous cervical lesions, using figures on 2,282 women living in Costa Rica.
Women who tested positive for carcinogenic human papillomavirus had a much higher risk, especially with the high-risk virus subtypes 16 and 18. Infection "strongly predicts" a diagnosis of pre-cancerous lesions over the next few years, they conclude.
Writing in an accompanying editorial, Dr Guglielmo Ronco, and his team from the Centre for Cancer Prevention, Turin, Italy, state that: "Screening under age 25 has very low effectiveness; after that human papillomavirus genotyping helps to stratify risk".
Leave a Reply