Study to Determine Concordance between High-Risk Human Papilloma Virus DNA Detection in Self Collected First Voided Urine Samples and Health-Care Worker Collected Cervical Samples in a Subset of Women with Proven Histopathological Precancerous and Cancerous Lesions of the Cervix

Abstract

Objective: The objective of our study was to assess whether urinary samples for human papilloma virus (HPV) detection are a good predictive marker of cervical cancerous and precancerous lesions, by comparing against results from cervical scrapings as the gold standard test. Materials and Methods: The study is a hospital-based cross-sectional study wherein symptomatic women were screened at the colposcopy clinic. Paired samples-cervical scrapings/washings and urine samples were tested for hr-HPV for women who were found to harbor premalignant and malignant lesions of the cervix in histopathological lesions, by multiplex real-time polymerase chain reaction and HPV genotyping. Diagnostic accuracy was tested by calculating concordance with Cohen’s kappa with hr-HPV detection in cervical samples as the gold standard. Results: A total of 295 patients undergoing colposcopy were recruited in the study, out of which 54 had histopathological-proven premalignant and malignant lesions of the cervix. Overall, positivity rate in urinary samples for both HPV 16 and 18 combined is 64.81%, whereas for cervical samples is 68.51%. HPV 16 was seen in 30 (55.5%) and 32 (59.3%) cervical and urinary samples, respectively, whereas HPV 18 was seen in 7 (12.9%) and 6 (11.1%) samples, respectively. There was substantial concordance between the cervical samples and first-void urinary samples results with Cohen’s k: 0.6988 (95% confidence interval: From 0.507 to 0.891). There was 85.96% agreement among all the tests that were performed with only 14.04% disagreement. Conclusions: The study showed that HPV DNA detection from the urine and cervical samples showed significant agreeability for the detection of precancerous and cancerous lesions of the cervix among women with abnormal histology results. Thus, urinary sampling can be done as a potential replacement for cervical sampling methods with the added benefit as it can be used in females reluctant to provide cervical samples, if there is no availability of skilled workforce for collecting samples, for mass screening, and for the follow-up of vaccination programs.