« Women's Health News

January 2007 »

Smokes link to cervical cancer

Jan. 03, 2007

Women who carry the common human papilloma virus are much more likely to develop cervical cancer if they smoke, an Australian women’s health group has warned.
  
Marie Stopes International said a recent Swedish study showed that a combination of smoking and high-level HPV infection could increase a woman’s risk of developing cervical cancer 27-fold, particularly among long-term smokers.
 
HPV is a common infection typically occurring in women aged 18-30 and is spread by genital skin-to-skin contact.
  
It usually takes the body one to two years to clear the virus naturally. About 80 per cent of the population will carry the virus at some time and many women are unaware they are carrying the virus until it shows up in a Pap smear result.
  
The group’s chief executive, Suzanne Dvorak, said that while non-smoking women with high-level HPV infection had six times the risk of getting cervical cancer, that risk quadrupled in women who smoked.
  
“There was also a link between the duration of smoking and cancer, with long-term smokers more likely to have an HPV infection causing cervical cancer,” Ms Dvorak said.
  
“If mouth cancer, lung cancer, heart disease and the many other tobacco-related diseases aren’t enough to make female smokers quit, hopefully these findings will be.”
  
She said HPV was unlikely to cause cervical cancer by itself but when certain HPV infections took longer than normal to clear from the body there was an increased risk of cervical cancer.  

Read More: http://www.thewest.com.au/default.aspx?MenuID=28&ContentID=17660