September 25, 1998

The Gillette Centers for Women's Cancers – located at the MGH and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute – recently awarded a grant to a group of researchers for a study that examines both the basic biology of cervical cancer and the lives and health of women at risk for the disease.

The study will enroll 2,000 young women from a variety of racial and economic backgrounds and will tap the expertise of researchers throughout Dana-Farber/Partners CancerCare and Harvard Medical School.

The researchers will investigate two troubling trends that have developed in the demographics of the disease. First is a relative increase in adenocarcinoma, a malignant tumor that begins in cells lining the walls of the cervix. Second is that many of these cancers are being diagnosed in women under age 35.

The researchers hope to understand why some women seem more susceptible to the disease than others, why Pap smears don't always pick up adenocarcinomas in their earliest stages, and whether Pap tests can be made more sensitive.

The study will focus on dysplasia, a condition in the cervical tissue that is often a precursor to cancer. In 80 percent of women with dysplasia, the abnormal cells show evidence of being infected by the human papillomavirus (HPV), whereas only 10 percent of women with normal cervical tissue have HPV infection.

"Cervical cancer is the second most common malignancy of the female reproductive tract after ovarian cancer, accounting for nearly 5,000 deaths a year in the United States," says the study's principal investigator, Ellen Sheets, MD, of the Gillette Centers. "This study will enable us to explore these questions by bringing together a research team from a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Our goal is to find better ways of identifying women at risk and developing new ideas for prevention."