How HPV Testing Correlates With HIV

People with HIV positive status have high risk of HPV virus and cancer, that’s why a reason of more targeted screening for HPV appears. HIV positive  men who have sex with men (MSM) have a high number of anal cancers. MSM of older ages have shown high rates of anal cancers, possibly because of long-term immunologic peculiarities in the population. Vaccination in the young age could help to avoid future problems and cancer. The study, recently lead in the UK, was dedicated to the reasons for targeted HPV vaccination programme to adult MSM.

In many countries with high incomes HPV screening has become some kind of a routine procedure, but in sub-Saharan region and other limited resource countries, neither cervical screening nor widespread vaccination for youngsters. That is one of the reasons why cervical cancer rates are becoming higher.

A longterm study from the year 1994 till 2010 among HIV-positive women have much higher rates of progression from HPV to high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions as well as higher levels of progression from normal to HPV, and from normal to high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions.

Different problems make such an intervention quite unreasonable in the case of sub-Saharan HIV+ women.  First of all the HPV prevalence among the population make HPV testing inefficient as a stand-alone screening strategy and tends to reduce its positive predictive value.  Another fact is that, the tests for HPV require special equipment and laboratories, not likely to be available in Africa.