Prevalence of human papillomaviruses in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma in Lithuania and Belarus.

Overall, head and neck sqamous cell carcinoma accounts for more than 550,000 cases annually worldwide. It is well known that human papillomavirus (HPV) is the main risk factor for cervical cancer development. As the incidence and the mortality of cervical cancer are closely related to the HPV prevalence, we hypothesized that there is the same association between HPV prevalence and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. Therefore we performed the study aiming to compare the level of HPV infection and HPV type distribution between two groups of Lithuanian and Belarusian patients with head and neck sqamous cell carcinoma. One hundred ninety head and neck sqamous cell carcinoma patients were included in the study, 75 from Lithuania and 115 from Belarus. PCR was used for HPV detection and typing. The distribution of HPV infection among head and neck sqamous cell carcinoma patients was similar in the Lithuanian (20.0%) and Belarusian (18.3%) patient groups, however differences were found in the distribution of HPV types.