Controlled Trial of Cervical Cancer Screening Frequency Among Human Papillomavirus Vaccinated Women II : Cervical Pre‐Cancer End‐Points by Specific Non‐Vaccine HPV Types
We conducted a controlled trial among 5626 early adolescent women vaccinated in 2007-2009 against human papillomavirus (HPV) types 16/18 to evaluate the impact of high-intensity versus low-intensity cervical screening, respectively at ages 22/25/28 and 28 years with squamous-cell intraepithelial lesions (SILs) as the end-point. Over the 16-year follow-up, most of the cytologically and/or histologically confirmed low-grade and high-grade SILs were associated with non-vaccine-targeted, medium oncogenicity HPV types 33/35/52/58 belonging to clade A9. The low-intensity cervical screening was non-inferior to the high-intensity screening in the identification of these lesions. Possibly, the transition from cervical infections with vaccine-covered HPV types to infections with non-vaccine-covered HPV types contributes to more manageable occurrence of the screen-detected cervical lesions. Reduction of cervical screening among vaccinated women to a minimum may be warranted to balance the harm-benefit ratio of screening.
Authors
- Matti Lehtinen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9481-0535)
- K. Miriam Elfström (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0514-7226)
- Saara Kares (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6185-9017)
- Anna Söderlund‐Strand (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-8886-4385)
- Mònica Ortega Llobet (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4248-1880)
- Joakim Dillner (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8588-6506)
- Tiina Eriksson (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3821-9775)
- Kaisa Heikkilä
- Mehran Ghaderi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5396-6023)
- Penelope Grace Gray (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9065-4734)
- Ville Nikolai Pimenoff (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0813-7031)
- Camilla Lagheden
- Iacopo Baussano (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7322-1862)
- Katja Harjula
- Mari Hokkanen
- Pekka Nieminen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2109-124X)
Institutions
- University of Helsinki (FI)
- Lund University (SE)
- Karolinska Institutet (SE)
- Fimlab (Finland) (FI)
- Skåne University Hospital (SE)
- Centre international de recherche sur le cancer (FR)
- University of Oulu (FI)
Publication Details
- Journal
- International Journal of Cancer
- Published
- 2026-10-15
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/ijc.70753
- Primary Topic
- Cervical Cancer and HPV Research
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- European Commission