Genital Human Papillomavirus Types in Immunocompetent and Immunodepressed Women in Northeast Italy: Prevalence and Cytomorphological Correlations

Abstract

H uman papillomaviruses (HPVs) are etiologically related to the development of cervical cancer [1] and the large majority of the squamous cell abnormalities that precede squamous cell carcinoma of the cervix [2]. More than 80 different HPV types exist; 35-40 types infect the anogenital area. The relative risk associations of 15 common anogenital types, in which types 6/11, 42, 43, and 44 were defined as "low risk," types 31, 33, 35, 51, 52, and 58 as "intermediate risk," and types 16, 18, 45, and 56 as "high risk," show that the presence of an oncogenic HPV type confers a higher rel-Abstract Objective. We evaluated the prevalence of genital human papillomavirus (HPV) types in correlation with cytomorphological findings in patients at different risk for cervical intraepithelial neoplasia living in northeast Italy.Methods. Exfoliated cervicovaginal cells from 943 women, who were divided into three groups, were analyzed by polymerase chain reaction.Results. Overall, HPV prevalence rates were 7%, 38%, and 52%, respectively. The single most frequent type was HPV 16 (18%), followed by types 6, 31, 53, 58, 61, and novel/unidentified (5-7%); other types had a frequency Ͻ 5%. Infection with multiple types was present in 12%. In HIV-infected women, HPV infection was correlated with lower CD4 level and higher viral load; HGSILs were correlated only with a lower CD4 count, and no correlations were found for LGSILs.Conclusions. HGSILs were associated with high-risk types, mainly HPV 16 (40%). LGSILs, instead, were associated with a broad spectrum of low-risk and high-risk types.

Frequency and clinical significance of human β‐herpesviruses in cervical samples from Italian women

“…High-risk HPV types, were infact more prevalent in HSIL (93%) samples when compared to the LSIL (60%) and ASCUS (41%) groups. The prevalence of HPV-31 (25.5%) demonstrated in this study was higher than that described in other previous studies conducted in Italy (ranged from 4.4% to 19.5%) [Del Mistro et al, 2001;Zerbini et al, 2001;Rassu et al, 2005;De Francesco et al, 2005;Tornesello et al, 2006;Gargiulo et al, 2007]. This may be partly explained by the high intra-type variation which has been described for HPV-31 [Calleja-Macias et al, 2005] which can frequently result in missed detection of this genotype by standard diagnostic assays used in epidemiological studies.…”

Human papillomavirus typing of invasive cervical cancers in Italy

“…HPV 16 was detected in 32 cases (72.7%), a result indicating a very high prevalence in Italy, in keeping with other studies [2,7,8]. Indeed, in our region HPV 16 is the most prevalent type also in high grade lesions; 40% of samples cytologically diagnosed as high grade squamous intraepithelial lesions [9], and 65.5% (36/55) of histologically confirmed CIN3/CIS (data not shown). These data are in line with the notion that HPV 16 positive infections are at great risk of clinical progression and need a closer follow-up, as recommended also by other authors [10].…”

Low prevalence of HPV-driven head and neck squamous cell carcinoma in North-East Italy

“…DNA was isolated from all 247 FF tumor tissues by Phenol-Chlorophorm (PC9) method as described in [27] , [28] . One-hundred-fourteen samples were re-sectioned and DNA was re-extracted by MagNA Pure 96 DNA and viral NA Large Volume Kit (Roche, Penzberg, Germany) according to the manufacturer´s recommendations [26] , [29] .…”