Until now, the efficacy of vaccines against the infection itself and against the development of precancerous lesions has been well known. But the data were less precise on the frequency of reported cancers.
Posted
Update
Reading time : 1 min.
Hope is confirmed. Cases of cervical cancer have particularly declined among British women who have received a vaccine against the papillomavirus infection, the cause of these cancers, finds a study published Thursday, November 4.
“Our study provides the first direct evidence of the effect of vaccination against the human papillomavirus (HPV), via the bivalent vaccine Cervarix, on the frequency of cervical cancer”, summarize the authors of this work published in the Lancet. Cancers of the cervix are almost always caused by a sexually transmitted infection with papillomavirus. Since the mid-2000s, vaccines have been available against it.
Until now, the efficacy of vaccines against the infection itself and against the development of pre-cancerous lesions was well known. But the data were less precise on the frequency of reported cancers. This is the contribution of the Lancet study. According to its findings, there is a marked reduction in cases of cervical cancer among women eligible for the UK vaccination campaign, launched in the late 2000s.
This decrease, measured in relation to the proportion of cases in previous generations, is particularly noticeable in women likely to have been vaccinated early, at 12 or 13 years old. In recent years, cervical cancer has almost disappeared there and the conclusions of this study have limits. Even without vaccination, researchers expected only a limited number of cancers in this age group, which does not exceed 25 years today. They therefore stress that it will be necessary to continue to study the frequency of cancers there in the years to come.