Single dose of HPV vaccine effective against cervical cancer: Research

New research points to the efficacy of a single dose of the human papillomavirus vaccine in protecting women against cervical cancer.

This was according to a study published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), around 79 million Americans were infected with the human papilloma virus (HPV), with 14 million infections reported each year.

CDC further said every year, around 26,000 new cancers occurred in the US of which 18,000 were among women, and 11,500 were cases of cervical cancer.

Currently two HPV vaccines were available that protect against the HPV infections, which could cause cervical cancer, Gardasil and Cervarix.

According to current guidelines these vaccines needed to be administered to girls in a series of three shots at age 11 or 12, or for girls aged 13 to 26 who had not yet been vaccinated.

However, according to a CDC report released this year, the vaccination coverage among adolescent girls between 2006 and 2013, revealed that only 53.8 per cent of girls aged between 13 and 17 had the HPV vaccine, and of these, only 33.4 per cent had all three doses.

On the basis of the report, researchers from the US, Costa Rica, the Netherlands and France set out to determine whether one or two does of the Cervarix HPV vaccine might produce similar protective effects against HPV.

Researchers involved in the NCI-funded study, published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research, examined the immune response in blood samples of women who had been administered one, two or three doses of vaccine.

They found that the antibodies against human papillomavirus types 16 and 18, which are sexually transmitted and caused most cervical cancer were present in all samples.

USA Today quoted Mahboobeh Safaeian, an investigator in the National Cancer Institute's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, as saying that this was really exciting for resource-poor countries and areas like Appalachia. She added, the implications were  humongous for those settings.

According to Dr A Bennett Jenson - one of two University of Louisville researchers, along with Dr Shin-je Ghim, who helped develop the cervical cancer vaccine, he hoped the one-shot results held up, the report said.

He had been working with colleagues in India on efforts to reduce the enormous burden of cervical cancer there, where it was the biggest cancer killer of women.

According to Jenson, women worldwide would be more likely to get the vaccine if they only needed one dose, meaning more lives, money, time and effort would be saved. He added, if it worked in places like India, it would really be great.