A 16 year old girl named Julie went to her doctor a few months after having sex for the first time. She told her doctor that a few days ago she had noticed some odd bumps on her genitals that hadn’t been there before. After running some tests, her doctor found that she had contracted the HPV6 strain of human papillomavirus.
Luckily for Julie, as her doctor explained, HPV6 was a low-risk strain of HPV and usually only presented the symptom of genital warts. Her doctor explained to Julie that HPV was spread through direct contact (usually sexual), and that her risk for contracting more HPV infections would rise with an increasing number of sexual partners. To prevent contracting more strains of HPV, as well as to prevent spreading it, her doctor explained, she should start the HPV vaccine immediately and also use condoms every time she had sex, especially if she had multiple partners.
In order to get rid of the genital warts, the doctor presented Julie with some options including special creams, cryotherapy (freezing the wart off), surgical removal, or laser removal. Despite her diagnosis, her doctor informed Julie that HPV was a transient type of infection, and often times resolved with time.
Case Study II
Anna is a 29 year old woman who went to her gynecologist after two years of no appointment for a yearly exam. She explained to her doctor that she had broken up with her boyfriend of 4 years nearly a year ago, and that she had had 2 other sexual partners since then. Her doctor completed her exam, including her Pap smear test, as usual. Anna left the office and received a follow-up call a week later, asking her to set an appointment to speak with the doctor about her lab results. During the appointment, her doctor informed her that she had an HPV infection, the high-risk strain of HPV16, and that it had caused some abnormal, precancerous cell changes in her cervix. Anna was upset, but her doctor explained that there were treatments for this infection. She explained to Anna that precancerous cervical changes sometimes went away on their own, and that typically, if the infection wasn’t too bad, they could simply monitor the infection and wait to see if it went away on its own.
The doctor also explained that the precancerous cervical changes could also be treated by a variety of methods, including cryosurgery (freezing of the tissue), LEEP (loop electrosurgical excision procedure – the removal of cervical tissue using a hot wire loop), surgical conization (surgery with a scalpel, laser, or both to remove a cone-shaped piece of tissue from the cervix and cervical canal), and laser vaporization conization (use of a laser to destroy cervical tissue). Her doctor reassured Anna that these treatments usually worked, and that HPV sometimes even resolved itself within the body, but that if worst came to worst, cervical cancer was a very treatable cancer and could be treated effectively with the use of radiation therapy and chemotherapy.
Statistics and other HPV facts
IMPORTANT HPV STATISTICS:
Out of all of the sexual active adults, 75-80% will catch the HPV virus before the age of 50.
On average ages 15-25 are the most common ages of where one becomes infected for the first time by the HPV virus.
To learn more facts about HPV watch the videos below