Women's Media Nation | Social, political, and cultural issues relating to women

The facts about cervical cancer

posted by ChickSpeak
Sunday, August 1, 2010 at 11:29am CDT

Perhaps one of the most well known preventive cancer treatments it the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, which is one hundred percent effective in precluding the development of cervical cancers since it’s FDA approval in 2006.

Auspiciously, doctors are indicating that the same HPV vaccine for cervical cancer may prevent other cancers in men and women.

The Human Papilloma Virus, commonly known as HPV, causes an infection in the stratified epithelium of the skin membrane and infects more than 80 percent of women by age 50, according to the American Social Health Association.

In addition, HPV causes approximately 70 percent of cervical cancers and 85 percent of genital warts, and recent studies have found HPV DNA in many cancer tumors.

In a 2007 study competed at the John Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, researches found that the oral form of HPV was the leading risk factor of alcohol and tobacco use in throat cancer.

“The tip of the iceberg is this whole HPV connection with cancer,” said Dr. Glenn Bauman, chairman of oncology at the University of Western Ontario faculty of medicine and radiation oncologist at the London Health Sciences Centre. “What’s interesting is what we’re finding is that HPV plays a role in many other mucosal cancers.”

Due to the fact that research is associating increasing cases of head, neck, genital, and urinary-genital tract cancers to HPV, the HPV vaccine will likely help prevent such cancers as well. Thus, administering the vaccine to boys and girls may reduce a variety of different types of cancer.

The HPV vaccine works similarly to other immunizations that guard against viral infections. The surface components of HPV create an antibody response that protects the body against infection, and medical researchers used this premise to create the vaccine.

Once a human body receives the vaccine, the surface components form virus like particles, which in turn causes the body to produce antibodies against the real HPV. The prevention of the infection also thwarts the growth of cervical cell changes that may lead to cancer.

If HPV is in fact at the root of many cancers, then the vaccine may prevent the virus and thus, the cancers. Thus, the FDA approved the vaccination for use in males ages 9 to 26 in order to prevent genital warts caused by HPV6 and HPV11. However, the vaccines do not get rid of existing HPV infections, which may develop into cancer.

After extensive Food and Drug Administration research, health officials say they play to nationally market the vaccine for the target populations of other cancers as well. In fact, the vaccination was approved by Health Canada in February for sale in Canada to prevent other cancers besides cervical cancer and for men between the ages of 9 and 26.

Although the vaccine is relatively new and the long-term effectiveness is uncertain for other cancers, it shows promise in reducing HPV related cancer cell changes, which may reduce the overall number of cancer cases in the United States.