MARYLAND, United States: Researchers at the John Hopkins University, Baltimore, have recently found that Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccination would possess moderate association with Oro Pharynx Cancer (OPC) incidence in the next 25 years. The incidence reduction would mostly be seen in young and middle-aged adults who already have been at the lowest risk of OPC.
Oropharyngeal cancer has been the most common HPV-related cancer. According to the Oral Cancer Foundation, more than fifty thousand new cases of OPC occur in the US each year. The use of alcohol and tobacco have also been the risk factors, but have seen increasingly less significant than HPV.
Whereas HPV has been the most common sexually transmitted infectious virus around the globe. HPV infections are often silent. Although most infections would clear, some have been chronic and could trigger cancers including, mouth and throat (oropharyngeal) and cervical cancer. There has been no cure for existing HPV infections, but new infections would be preventable with vaccines.
To conduct a study, Yuehan Zhang and colleagues determined the current and future HPV vaccination attempts from the surveys conducted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and calculated the OPC rates based on current and past incidence data from the National Cancer Institute.
The researchers estimated that by 2045 HPV vaccination has been expected to reduce OPC incidence among individuals 36 to 55 years of age, but among those 56 years or older, rates have not been significantly reduced.
The research “Projected Association of Human Papillomavirus Vaccination With Oropharynx Cancer Incidence in the US, 2020-2045” has been recently published in JAMA Oncology.
