Cervix carcinoma has been a serious, long-term issue in the Czech Republic. About 1,000 new cases are diagnosed every year and about 400 female patients die as a result of the disease. More than 20,000 women in the Czech Republic live with a history of cervix carcinoma therapy and the potential risk of its recurrence. Although the past years have been marked with effective organisational changes in cervix carcinoma screening thanks to which a decreasing trend of its incidence can be observed, there is a lack of substantial impact on the occurrence of advanced stages of the disease and mortality. Similar data have also been reported internationally: foreign authors analysed cases of patients with a malignant cervix tumour. They reported that 24 - 32% of females with a diagnosed malignant tumour had periodically undergone cytological screening. The reason is that the sensitivity of an individual cytological examination for detecting severe pre-cancer is limited, ranging between 40 - 75% and only increasing with repeated examinations. The negative predictive value of the cytological swab is additionally limited and reaches 0.78% in recent studies over a three-year screening interval.
The cause of nearly all cervix carcinomas is human papilomavirus (HPV). Hence the detection of the HPV genome is a more prospective screening tool with higher sensitivity than a cytological swab. The sensitivity of the validated HPV DNA test using PCR method reaches 94.5% for detecting severe pre-cancer (confidence interval 94.2 - 96.9%). As shown by comparative studies, the sensitivity of the HPV DNA test for the detection of severe pre-cancer is 35% higher on average when compared to the cytological test. The HPV DNA test in addition shows a significantly better negative three-year predictive value (0.34%) and the low value continues for at least another five years. The lower specificity of the HPV DNA test can be compensated by selective genotype specification with proof of the most frequent oncogenic genotypes HPV 16 and HPV 18. This promising procedure, validated by large multicentric randomised studies and introduced to clinical practice in several European countries, primarily uses the detection of HPV DNA.
The study repeatedly determined the presence of the HPV genome, including the prevalence of selected HPV genotypes (16, 18 and other hrHPV) and conventional cytology. The relative sensitivity of the two methods was specified. In the course of the prospective follow-up, the incidence of pre-cancers and invasive tumours in the study population were specified.
