Researcher says HIV-positive women in treatment program are more likely to be diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer.
Woman living with HIV face elevated risk of certain cancers, a new British Columbia study has found.
By comparing databases of the B.C. Cancer Agency and the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE), Simon Fraser University PhD student Kate Salters discovered that HIV-positive women were far more likely to be diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer, Hodgkin’s lympohoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Kaposi’s sarcoma.
In the case of invasive cervical cancer, the diagnosis rate for women with HIV was 24 times higher than women who don’t have HIV, said SFU professor Robert Hogg, Salters’ supervisor on the study and a senior research scientist at the BC-CfE.
Hogg told Metro there were some common traits found among the diagnosed women that leads researchers to believe more effective treatment could cut down on rates.
For example, a significant portion of the women with HIV that were also diagnosed with cancer had lapses in their HIV treatment the year before.