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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A simple test may be all it takes to find some cancers.
New research from Johns Hopkins University finds an oral rinse may detect human papillomavirus (HPV)-positive head and neck cancers.
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Researchers took oral rinse samples from 135 patients with head and neck carcinomas. An analysis of the tissue showed 44 of these patients had HPV16-positive tumors. The tissue and oral rinse samples were genetically sequenced to specify the HPV variants in each of them.
Patients with HPV16-positive tumors were much more likely to have oral HPV16 infections -- an almost ten-fold increase before therapy and a fourteen-fold increase after therapy. Those with high-risk oral HPV infections before therapy also had a 44-fold increase of an infection after treatment.
There is no question of cause, study co-author Maura Gillison, M.D., Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, was quoted as saying. It has now become a question of tracking the infection over time to identify those at risk of developing HPV-positive cancer, and for those who have had it, the risk of recurrence and risk of transmission. This is the first study in which we have been able to track the disease and related oral infections for an extended period of time.
Gillison says future research will be able to use the findings to explore further the connection between HPV and head and neck cancer formation, as well as the biological factors involved.
SOURCE: Clinical Cancer Research, 2008;14
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