Abstract

Accumulating evidence strongly associates human papillomavirus infection with the development of cervical cancers. However, it has also become increasingly clear that HPV infections of the cervix span a wide clinical spectrum from benign lesions to precancerous lesions, with only a minority of infections resulting in invasive cancers, although the reasons for this are not clear. Longitudinal epidemiologic studies using cytologic methods to detect HPV infection have shown that the majority of women infected with HPV will regress spontaneously. In addition, age-stratified data for rates of HPV positivity from cross-sectional studies also suggest that many women clear the infection spontaneously. These results support the concept that many women may be only transiently infected with HPV during their life span and only in women with persistent HPV infection does cervical cancer progress. In addition to persistence of HPV infection, recent epidemiological studies indicate that the amount of high-risk HPV (viral load or HPV gene copy number) in cervicovaginal epithelial cells may be a risk factor for cervical cancer. Thus, a technique which could detect, genotype and quantitate HPV in smears of cervicovaginal epithelial cells would be of major import in assessment of patient clinical status as well as in epidemiological studies relating HPV infection to cervical cancer.

© 1996 Optical Society of America