Aimee Kreimer

PhD

NCI, DCEG, IIB

Investigator

PLCO (Learn more about this study)

PLCO-75

Apr 18, 2014

Calculating risk of oropharyngeal cancer by HPV16 E6 serostatus

HPV is a necessary cause of cancer of the cervix, and also causes a subset of cancers of the anus, penis, vagina, vulva, oropharynx, and to a lesser degree, oral cavity and larynx. We prospectively evaluated the risk conferred by HPV infection as indicated by seropositivity against HPV antibodies for multiple anatomic sites in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer (EPIC) cohort. We found that seropositivity against HPV16 E6, one of the two HPV oncogenes that are preferentially retained and expressed in cancers, was present in prediagnostic plasma of 35% (N=47 of 135) of cases with oropharyngeal cancer and 0.6% (N=9 of 1599) of controls (adjusted OR=274, 95% CI 110 to 681). We further evaluated HPV16 E6 seropositivity and oropharyngeal cancer in strata defined by lead-time between blood collection and cancer diagnosis (<5 years, 5-10 years, and 10+ years), and noted that the proportion of seropositive cases was nearly identical in all lead-time categories, the maximum lead-time in EPIC being 13.7 years. We sought to validate this discovery using PLCO data and found similar results- preliminary analysis suggests an even higher proportion of oropharynx cases were HPV16 E6 seropositive (48%); again, seropositivity in controls was extremely rare (<1.0%). With the HPV data in PLCO, we now aim to compute absolute risk of oropharynx cancer by HPV16 E6 serostatus using the entire PLCO study population, and weighting back serum results from the tested subset to the entire cohort (intervention arm only).