Awareness of HPV-Related Cancers among University Students: A Cross-sectional Study

Abstract

Background: HPV is associated with some malignant neoplasms, especially cancers of the cervix, oropharynx, penis, anus and vulva.
 Aims: The aim of this study was to analyze the awareness of Human Papillomavirus-associated cancers among university students.
 Methodology: We conducted a cross-sectional research among medical students and student nurses from four institutions from June to December 2020. A questionnaire was utilized to obtain information about sexual behavior and awareness of HPV among those students.
 Results: A total of 201 undergraduates participated in the study. Of those 147 were medical students and 54 were student nurses. The majority were female 133 (66.17%), and the most frequent age group was 20-24 years old, amounting to 121 (60.20%) students. All participants knew that HPV causes cervical cancer. A little over half of the participants 107 (53.23%) knew the relation between HPV and penile cancer. Less than half 95 (47.26%) knew that HPV causes oropharyngeal cancer. However, only 10 (4.98%) knew that HPV causes anal cancer.
 Conclusion: In this study, medical and student nurses showed good awareness of the link between HPV and cervical cancer but limited knowledge of the causal link between HPV and oropharyngeal, penile and anal cancers.

Knowledge about the Relation between Human Papillomavirus and Oropharynx Squamous Cell Carcinomas among University Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

“…The pooled analysis of all included studies indicated that among university students, the knowledge level about this relationship ranged from 17.00% to 83.00%, with an overall pooled prevalence of 45.00% (95% CI: 35.00-55.00). This result is similar to the findings by Alzabibi et [11,23,25,30,12]. This suggests that while there is some awareness of the link between HPV and oropharyngeal cancer among university students, there is also significant room for improvement in knowledge dissemination and education in this regard.…”

“…22 studies with 11.362 participants were included in this systematic review. These studies were conducted in different countries [11][12][13][14][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. As depicted in Table 1, a total of 21 cross-sectional studies and 1 Cohort study, were included.…”