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FRIDAY, Nov. 17 (HealthDay News) -- New research suggests that heavy smoking and high levels of a potentially deadly virus could combine forces and boost a woman's risk of developing precancerous lesions in the cervix.
Smoking and the human papillomavirus (HPV) have been linked to cervical cancer before. But the new study is the first to look at a possible interplay between heavy smoking and virus levels, said study author Anthony Gunnell, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.
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"The risk for developing pre-malignant cervical cancer increases as HPV load increases," Gunnell said. "Importantly though, it increases more with increasing HPV (levels) if you smoke than if you don't."
The American Cancer Society estimates that about 9,710 cases of cervical cancer will be diagnosed in the United States this year, and 3,700 will die.
However, the number of deaths dropped by 74 percent between 1955 and 1992, mostly because of the growing popularity of Pap tests that detect possible signs of cancer. Now, there is a vaccine available to prevent HPV infection and most cases of cervical cancer.
Scientists think a huge number of cervical cancer cases are caused by HPV, which may be the most common sexually transmitted disease. HPV seems to boost the risk of cancer by causing inflammation.
But how does it raise the risk, and why do some women get infected by HPV but never get cervical cancer?
In the new study, Gunnell and colleagues looked at the medical records of 738 women, including 375 with signs of precancerous cervical lesions and 363 healthy women. The researchers found the subjects by looking through a database of 146,104 women who underwent cervical screening in a region of Sweden between 1969 and 1995.
The findings are published in the November issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
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