Human papillomavirus (HPV) detected in restored plasma DNA from women diagnosed with pre-invasive lesions and invasive cervical cancer

Abstract

Objective: To improve the sensitivity of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) detection in plasma from high-grade cervical neoplasia patients (CIN III) and cervical cancer (CC) evaluating any likely correlation with disease stage.
Method: We subjected plasma DNA isolates from 112 patients (CIN and ICC) to a pre-PCR restoration treatment to improve detection sensitivity. HPV-specific sequences were detected by conventional PCR both in cervical scrapes and plasma DNA obtained from each patient. For every single DNA sample, both non-restored and restored isolates were PCR analyzed.
Results: We detected HPV in plasma DNA isolates with significantly higher efficiency on restored plasma-DNA as compared to each non-restored equivalent, still maintaining close correlation with the clinical stage of the cases. By analyzing plasma-DNA isolates we could classify as HPV positive >50.0% of the cases that were previously known to be positive from the cervical scrape based assay. Interestingly, 100% of the cases in which subtype HPV18 was detected in cervical scrapes were also positive in plasma DNA.
Conclusions: Restoration of plasma DNA from cervical cancer patients allows a more sensitive PCR-based HPV detection, maintaining the correlation to disease stage traditionally observed.

Authors

• Yazmín Rocío Arias Universidad Nacional de Colombia
• Edward Fabían Carrillo Universidad Nacional de Colombia
• Fabio Ancizar Aristizabal Universidad Nacional de Colombia