- Cancer Research UK-funded screening expert, Professor Peter Sasieni, gives us his thoughts on an important development in cervical cancer research
“Plans should be made for the roll out of HPV testing nationally”
New research from the US, published last night in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, has significant implications for the NHS cervical screening programme.
The headline finding, as Cancer Research UK reports on its newsfeed is that testing a woman’s smear samples for the human papillomavirus (HPV) predicts who is likely to go on develop early signs of cervical cancer up to 18 years later.
And the study, which involved 4,000 women, showed the power of testing samples for the virus was much greater than the existing test – cytology – which looks down a microscope for abnormal cells.
This is not surprising. But it is new, and extremely important, as we’ll see below.