Determinants of genital human papillomavirus detection in a US population

This study investigated the association of selected demographic and behavioral characteristics with the detection of low-risk, high-risk, and uncharacterized genital human papillomavirus (HPV) in women attending clinic for routine nonreferral gynecologic health care. Cervical speci-mens obtained from 3863 women 18–40 years old (mean, 28 years) with no history of high-grade cervical disease were analyzed for 38 HPV types. Overall, HPV prevalence was 39.2%. The prevalence of high-risk, low-risk, and uncharacterized HPV types was 26.7%, 14.7%, and 13.0%, respectively. As expected, the characteristics most strongly associated with overall HPV detection were age and numbers of lifetime and recent sex partners. Low-risk, high-risk, and uncharacterized HPV detection increased with increasing numbers of sex partners. There was a decline in high-risk and low-risk HPV detection with increasing age but little change in un-characterized HPV detection. These results suggest that the uncharacterized HPV types have a different natural history than either low-risk or high-risk HPV types. The more than 100 different human papillomavirus (HPV) genotypes identified over the past 20 years [1] can be divided into discrete phylogenetic groups [2–4]. Within the past 5 years, several genital HPV genomes and L1 subgenomic fragment