NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women infected with HIV are more likely than seronegative women to be infected with high-risk HPV type 52, even after accounting for sexual activity and age, Canadian investigators report. They found frequent intratype polymorphisms, which is itself associated with increased risk of progression to squamous intraepithelial lesions.
According to senior author Dr. Francois Coutlee at McGill University, Montreal, and colleagues, “Knowledge of the intratypic genomic diversity of HPV sequences will facilitate the development of efficient diagnostic tools and vaccines, provide measures of genetic diversity as markers for epidemiological studies, and permit an evaluation of the relationship between HPV and disease.”
In their report, published in the November 15th issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the team notes that HPV-52 is a high-risk genotype detected in up to 2% of cases of cervical cancer.
Cervicovaginal lavage samples were obtained from participants in the Canadian Women’s HIV Study. HPV-52 was detected in 12.4% of samples from 732 HIV-positive subjects and 7.1% of HIV-negative subjects.
Molecular sequence analysis revealed 58 mutation sites defining 27 variants from 111 HPV-52 isolates. Women of African descent were more likely than white women to be infected with nonprototype variants (p = 0.0001).
Variations were more common in the long control regions (LCR) of the genome than in coding regions. The authors point out that LCRs contain binding sites for regulatory proteins and transcription factors, and can thus influence the replication and transcription of the virus.
“We now have the tools to investigate associations between genomic polymorphisms in HPV-52 and the persistence of infection or disease,” the investigators conclude.
Source: J Infect Dis 2003;188:1517-1527. [ Google search on this article ]
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