An investigation by the Australian Cancer Study analysed HPV DNA prevalence and HPV types in archived tumour samples from 222 patients, who were still living, and 55 normal tissue samples.
Only eight tumour samples contained evidence of HPV, amounting to 3.6% of the cohort. Six were positive for HPV-16 and two for HPV-35.
Although the prevalence was higher than in the control samples, none of which contained HPV, the very low prevalence indicated that the virus was most unlikely to be a common cause of the cancer.
Previous studies had suggested that there were important environmental risk factors for the cancer. HPV DNA had been detected in 30% of head and neck cancers, and it was hypothesised that the virus...
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