Background: A steady rise in incidence of oral cavity cancer cases especially among young males with no history of tobacco smoking or alcohol consumption have given rise to a new risk factor, namely human papillomavirus (HPV).
Objective: This study was conducted to determine prevalence and association of HPV among oral cavity cancer patients and healthy local population. It also aims to identify the association of HPV and risk factors such as smoking, alcohol consumption and betel nut chewing.
Patients and Methods: This case-control study involves a test group (oral cavity cancer patients) and a control group (healthy individuals). HPV status was tested via salivary rinse samples collection and processed using Diacarta Quantivirus® HPV E6/E7 RNA assay. Data collection and salivary sample collection were done from July 2013 till June 2014 involving patients from 3 different institutions.
Results: This study involves 58 subjects, consisting of 29 test subjects and 29 control subjects. HPV prevalence was found to be 55.1% among test subjects and 3.4% among control subjects. This was found to be significant (p=0.001) with odds ratio of 33.90 (95% CI 3.88, 295.99). Among the risk factors, smoking habit was seen in 51.2% of test subjects and 13.8% of control subjects. This association was found to be significant (p=0.041) with odds ratio of 4.36 (95% CI 1.06, 17.86). Multi-colinearity and interaction term were checked and none found. Alcohol consumption and betel nut chewing were found to be insignificant in this study.
Conclusion: HPV prevalence among oral cavity patients was found to be high and this pivotal result demonstrates HPV infection is now an established risk factor in this country. Smoking habit was also found to be a significant risk factor among these patients and did not interact or confound the factor of HPV infection.