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Human Papillomavirus and Related Cancers, Fact Sheet 2019 (2019-06-17)

Comment
Cervical cancer still represents a significant burden of disease in Italy. Cervical screening coverage is still suboptimal. In several Italian regions an organized screening programme is lacking and therefore many women undergo screening tests (either Pap test or HPV test) in an opportunistic manner, very often in the private sector. HPV prevalence is high, accounting for about 10% of women with normal cytology. HPV vaccination in adolescent women has been introduced in 2007 and vaccine is free of charge for all the birth cohorts included in the programme. According to the latest available data, about 70% of women in the oldest age cohorts (i.e. girls born in 1997-2001) completed the vaccination course and vaccine coverage is nearly 50% in the 2005 birth cohort. These data show both an attitude to postpone the time of vaccination and a suboptimal overall vaccine uptake. Since 2017, HPV vaccine has been also actively offered to adolescent males, starting from the 2006 birth cohort. Due to its very recent introduction, HPV vaccination coverage among boys is still very low, about 15% with marked disparities among regions. In 2017 ten childhood vaccines became mandatory in Italy. After the introduction of this policy, HPV vaccination coverage has shown a slight decrease probably due to the efforts needed to implement the vaccine mandates, which depleted human resources from the adolescent vaccination programme.¹

The Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) in Barcelona, Spain and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France jointly lead the HPV Information Centre, a web-based resource that compiles, processes and disseminates published information on HPV infection and HPV-related diseases for all countries of the world.

Country-specific Fact Sheets are standardized summaries of HPV-related disease burden and associated risk factors, prevention strategies, screening activities, and immunization programs for each of the 194 WHO member states. Fact Sheets include concise self-explanatory graphs and tables to offer a quick overview of the situation in the designated population. The system allows queries to generate statistics for individual countries, groups of countries, geographical regions or worldwide summaries.

More elaborated supplementary tables and comments can also be found in country-specific, regional and worldwide Full Reports from the original data base (www.hpvcentre.net). The HPV Information Centre publishes internationally recognized review monographs and targeted scientific publications to address relevant questions in the path to the cervical cancer elimination campaign. The HPV Information Centre is an open access, publicly funded resource to support the work of the scientific HPV community worldwide.

Key data on HPV and HPV-related cancers²
Italy has a population of 27.22 million women aged 15 years and older who are at risk of developing cervical cancer. Current estimates indicate that every year 3,105 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer and 986 die from the disease. Cervical cancer ranks as the 15th most frequent cancer among women in Italy and the 4th most frequent cancer among women between 15 and 44 years of age. About 4.1% of women in the general population are estimated to harbour cervical HPV-16/18 infection at a given time, and 72.2% of invasive cervical cancers are attributed to HPVs 16 or 18.

References

2. Bruni L, Albero G, Serrano B et al. ICO/IARC Information Centre on HPV and Cancer (HPV Information Centre). Human Papillomavirus and Related Diseases in Italy. Summary Report 17 June 2019. Available from: https://hpvcentre.net/statistics/reports/ITA.pdf?t=1561545158535

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Pier Luigi Lopalco, MD
Professor of Hygiene, Dept. of Translational Research and New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery - University of Pisa, Italy.
pierluigi.lopalco@unipi.it

Gina Albero, MSc, MPH, PhD
Cancer Epidemiology Research Programme, Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) - IDIBELL, Barcelona, Spain Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red-CIBERESP, Madrid, Spain ICO-IARC HPV Information Centre.
g.albero@iconcologia.net

Laia Bruni, MD, MSc, MPH, PhD
Cancer Epidemiology Research Programme, Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) - IDIBELL, Barcelona, Spain Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red-CIBERONC, Madrid, Spain ICO-IARC HPV Information Centre.
lbruni@iconcologia.net

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