Cervical Cancer Deaths Are Plummeting Among Young U.S. Women
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Rates of cervical cancer have decreased since a vaccine for human papillomavirus, or HPV, was introduced in 2006 (SN: 10/6/08). Now, a new study is the first to show a steep decline in cervical cancer deaths among the first women who were eligible for that vaccine in the United States.
We had a hypothesis that since it's been almost 16 years, that maybe we might be starting to see [the] initial impact of HPV vaccination on cervical cancer deaths," says Ashish Deshmukh, an epidemiologist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. And that's exactly what we observed."
Deshmukh emphasizes that he and colleagues can't say for certain that the vaccine is responsible for the decline in deaths, which the team reports November 27 in JAMA. That's because it's unclear whether the women in the study cohort were, in fact, vaccinated.
The HPV vaccine can prevent up to six HPV-related cancers: cervical, vaginal, vulvar, penile, oropharyngeal and anal (SN: 4/28/17). Deshmukh's team analyzed specifically cervical cancer mortality data from 1992 to 2021 for women younger than 25.
Grouping the data into three-year periods, the team found a gradual decline of cervical cancer deaths of almost 4 percent per period through 2013-2015. In that last period, there were about 0.02 deaths per 100,000 people. The steady drop might be due to improved prior prevention and screening methods for cervical cancer, the researchers speculate.
Then, over the six subsequent years, the team saw a dramatic reduction in mortality of just over 60 percent. By the 2019-2021 period, the rate had dropped to about 0.007 deaths per 100,000 people.
From 1992 to 2015, the number of deaths due to cervical cancer among U.S. women under the age of 25 fell steadily from each three-year period to the next. From 2016 to 2021, mortality plummeted. The dashed line shows the projected trends if the decline in mortality from 1992 to 2015 had continued to 2021; the solid line represents the observed trends.
They're seeing this precipitous drop in mortality at the time that we would be expecting to see it due to vaccination," says health economist Emily Burger of the University of Oslo. Ultimately, we hope we are preventing mortality and death [with the introduction of vaccines], and this study is really supporting that conclusion."
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