Cervical cancer ranks as the third most frequent cancer in women in the World. The global yearly incidence of cervical cancer for 2008 was 529,800 and 275,000 deaths, of which 88% occurred in the developing countries where it is the second most frequent cause of cancer death in women. In Egypt, no national data is available on incidence or mortality. Incidence rates have been estimated as the simple mean of the incidence rates from Gharbiah cancer registry (1999-2002) and applied to the 2008 population which were 514 annual number of new case and 299 deaths from cervical cancer, however, these data appeared to be actually underestimating incidence and mortality rates(1) . Human papillomavirus (HPV) type is the strongest factor that affects the absolute risk of viral persistence and progression to pre-cancer. About 130 HPV types are identified. Differences in geographic distribution of HPV types have been reported to exist between countries. The only available data on HPV prevalence in Egypt estimated the prevalence of HPV in normal cytology to be 10.3 %(2) and in patients with Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia (CIN) to be 65.9% with HPV-16/18 being the most prevalent genotypes (33.3%)(3).
Objective:
In View of scarcity of data in Egypt, to our knowledge, this is considered the first study aiming at determining the prevalence of HPV and distribution of different genotypes in both cervical carcinoma and pre-invasive lesions from population of Egyptian females. The identification of the prevalent genotypes is expected to help assessing the efficacy of introducing routine HPV vaccine and change in genotype trend after vaccine introduction.
