Román R1, Colomer A1, Erill N1, Calvo M3, Verdú M2, Cordon-Cardo C4, Puig X 1,2.
1BIOPAT, 2HISTOPAT Laboratoris and 3Statistics Dept. of the Universitat de Barcelona, Spain; and 4Division of Molecular Pathology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York.
Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the main etiologic factor for cervical cancer and its types are classified into low and high oncogenic risk according to their capability of inducing invasive tumors. We studied 978 paraffin-embedded anogenital biopsies (730 cervical plus 248 extracervical) for the presence of HPV DNA using a commercial PCR-based assay, followed by RFLP typing (PVHfast, PharmaGen; primers MY09/MY11). Samples were morphologically classified as normal, HPV-suspicious, condyloma acuminatum (CA), LSIL, HSIL, bowenoid papulosis (BP) and squamous-cell carcinoma. Our data agree with others reporting significant higher rates of HPV DNA in more advanced cervical lesions (18% LSIL vs 62% HSIL); odd ratio (OR)= 0.139 (99% CI 0.080-0.236), as well as a prevalence of high-risk types among HSIL (96%) vs LSIL (71%); OR= 0.096 (99% CI 0.016-0.438). Regarding extracervical pathology, high-risk types were better represented in BP (58%) than in CA (7%); OR= 0.056 (95% CI 0.010-0.272). HPV types 16, 31 and 6 were also found as being the predominant strands in HSIL/BP, LSIL and CA, respectively.