Word: hpv
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Doctors have long known about other risk factors for cervical cancer, including sexual activity at an early age and sex with multiple partners. And they have implicated some types of human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes genital warts, as the probable culprit. The University of Utah researchers, however, could only speculate about a possible mechanism by which smoking may cause cervical cancer. Harmful components of cigarette smoke, they suggest, may travel through the blood into the tissues of the cervix and somehow activate the virus...
Conventional treatments cannot rid the body of HPV, which can remain latent for decades. Thus the warts often recur. Worst of all, some types of HPV have been linked to cervical and other cancers; carriers of the virus who do not have warts are often unaware of the risk to themselves or their sexual partners...
Between 5% and 15% of those with persistent warts are expected to develop cancer, says Virologist Wayne Lancaster of Georgetown University. The most common by far is cancer of the cervix, but HPV has also been blamed for tumors of the vulva, vagina, anus and penis. The virus alone, however, probably does not cause cancer. Instead, say researchers, one or more of several co-factors seem to be required to trigger the disease. Among the suspected culprits: smoking, birth-control pills, and the presence of herpes and other venereal infections...
...incidence of cervical cancer has not matched the rise in HPV cases. But that is little comfort: there may be a latent period of five to 40 years before virus-associated cancers appear. Clinics are already seeing an increase of young women with Pap tests that show HPV-linked cervical dysplasia. These tissue abnormalities sometimes mean the cells are becoming malignant. Some researchers think HPV is involved in as many as 90% to 95% of all cases of dysplasia and cancer of the cervix...
...cases in young girls are especially worrisome. Some researchers suspect that because a teenager's cervix has more developing cells than an adult's, it is more vulnerable to HPV. At Children's Hospital in Boston about six teenagers a year must undergo surgery for cervical cancer, which in the past was extremely rare in the young...