A Comparative Study of Swede Score and Reid Colposcopic Index with Cervical Histopathology in Cervical Cancer Screening.

Abstract: The burden of cervical cancer in India, as well as all over the world is very high. Different screening modalities are available for early diagnosis during the precancerous stage making screening highly successful for cervical cancer(1). Early intervention in cases picked up by screening can help to reduce the burden of the disease. Reid and Scalzi introduced the Reid colposcopic index (RCI) for recording colposcopic findings and making colposcopic diagnosis less subjective, which is currently the most widely used scoring system.(2,3)The parameters used in RCI were aceto-whiteness, margins, vessel patterns and iodine staining; but this score did not consider lesion size. A new scoring system, the Swede score, has been devised by Strander et al.(4)In addition to the various parameters of Reid colposcopic index, it also incorporates lesion size as a fifth variable. We carried out this study to compare the two scoring systems taking histopathology as the gold standard. Both scores performed well in our study and the lesion size also corresponded with likelihood of harbouring high-grade lesions.