Source: medicalxpress.com Author: University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston A nationwide effort to adequately vaccinate 8 in 10 adolescents against the human papillomavirus (HPV) could prevent 934,000 cases of virus-associated, male oropharyngeal cancer over this century, reported investigators at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth Houston) School of Public Health in The Lancet Regional Health—Americas. At the start of each decade, the Healthy People program of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services establishes goals to reduce the most significant preventable threats to health, which include an 80% target for the HPV vaccination program. However, in the U.S., just 54% of adolescents and only 21% of young adults were adequately vaccinated as of 2019. To gage the effect of accomplishing an 80% target on male oropharyngeal cancer, the most common cancer caused by HPV, UTHealth Houston researchers created a simulation model to project the development of this cancer over a lifetime and to measure the impact of the HPV vaccination. "Our study is the first to develop and validate a comprehensive mathematical modeling framework of the natural history of oral HPV infection and its progression to oropharyngeal cancer," said Ashish A. Deshmukh, Ph.D., MPH, the study's senior author and an associate professor in the Department of Management, Policy and Community Health and associate director of the Center for Health Services Research at UTHealth School of Public Health. "Achievement of the 80% goal by 2025 and maintaining it could lead to the prevention of [...]

Source: www.mskcc.org Author: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, News and Information Rich Delgrosso found the lump while shaving. It was on the left side of his neck and it seemed to grow bigger by the day. He made an appointment with his ear, nose, and throat doctor. “He said the odds were 50/50 that it was an infection,” recalls the 56-year-old father of two from Pleasantville, New York. “I asked, ‘What’s the other 50?’” It was a possibility no one wanted to hear: Cancer. Rich underwent a biopsy and learned he had squamous cell carcinoma that had originated on the base of his tongue. His cancer, the doctor told him, was caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV). Rich was shocked. “I knew HPV could cause cancer,” he says, “but I thought it was only cervical cancer in women.” It’s true that HPV, a sexually transmitted virus, does cause the majority of cervical cancer cases in women. But it can also cause a variety of cancers in men, too, some of which are on the rise. HPV led to a five-fold increase of head and neck cancers in young men from 2001 to 2017, according to data released at the 2021 American Society for Clinical Oncology annual meeting. Memorial Sloan Kettering’s David Pfister, a medical oncologist who cares for people with head and neck cancer, says these cancer cases are just now emerging in people infected with the virus many years ago. “Once the association between HPV infection and throat cancers [...]