Objective

We assessed whether human papillomavirus (HPV) viral load is an independent predictor of underlying cervical disease and its diagnostic accuracy by age.

Methods

The Biomarkers of Cervical Cancer Risk study was a case-control study from 2001 to 2010 in Montréal, Canada. Cases were histologically-confirmed cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), adenocarcinoma in situ (AIS), or cervical cancer cases. Controls were women presenting for routine screening with normal cytology results. We quantified HPV16/18/31/33/45 viral load from exfoliated cervical cells using a real-time PCR assay. Diagnostic accuracy of viral load was assessed using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). We restricted the analysis to the 632 cases and controls who were HPV16/18/31/33/45 positive.

Results

Geometric mean HPV16/18/31/33/45 viral load increased with severity of lesion grade, ranging from 0.7, 3.1, 4.8, 7.2, and 12.4 copies/cell in normal, CIN1, CIN2, CIN3&AIS, and cervical cancer respectively. The adjusted odds ratio of CIN1+ and CIN2+ increased respectively by 1.3 (95%CI 1.1–1.4) and 1.2 (95%CI 1.1–1.3) per log-transformed viral copy/cell increase of HPV16/18/31/33/45. This association was mainly driven by HPV16, 18, and 31 viral loads. The AUC of HPV16/18/31/33/45 viral load for discriminating between normal and CIN1+ women was 0.70 (95%CI 0.64–0.76) in HPV-positive women, and was 0.76 (95%CI 0.66–0.86) for women ≥30 years and 0.66 (95%CI 0.58–0.74) for women under 30 years.

Conclusions

HPV viral load has lower diagnostic accuracy than has been reported for other HPV screening triage tests. However, it may be useful for triaging HPV tests in settings without cytology results such as HPV self-sampling.