"Proponents of HPV self-testing say its biggest appeal is in expanding the reach of cancer screenings, both to impoverished areas abroad, and also to women closer to home.
A trial underway now looks to test that idea in a woefully underserved region of the US — Appalachia.
“Cervical cancer really is such a cancer of disparities,” said Emma McKim Mitchell, the lead investigator for the trial. In Appalachian Virginia, those disparities are glaring. The state overall has some of the lowest rates of cervical cancer in the country — but women living in its Appalachian counties are diagnosed with cervical cancer about 13 percent more often than women elsewhere in the state, according to the Appalachia Community Cancer Network.
The women in the study get information about screening and a take-home kit with a long swab and instructions. They insert the swab like a tampon to collect vaginal and cervical cells, put that into an included test tube, and then mail the sample to the lab. There, technicians, instead of looking for precancerous cells as in a Pap test, look for the DNA of the dozen or so carcinogenic HPVs."
This sounds so much better...
FB: "With fewer actual cases of cervical cancer in the population due to vaccination, the Pap test’s positive predictive value — which is the chance that a person with a positive test result actually has the disease being tested for — is expected to decrease."
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