Tumor-specific and gender-specific pre-vaccination distribution of human papillomavirus types 6 and 11 in anogenital warts and laryngeal papillomas: a study on 574 tissue specimens

Abstract

Anogenital warts and laryngeal papillomas are two most important benign tumors etiologically linked with HPV. In the study, which included both the largest number of laryngeal papilloma tissue specimens (152 specimens from 152 patients) to date and the largest number of prospectively collected and histologically confirmed tissue specimens of anogenital warts obtained from both genders (422 specimens from 315 patients), HPV DNA was detected in 413/422 (97.9%) of anogenital warts and 139/152 (91.4%) of laryngeal papillomas. HPV-6 and/or HPV-11 were detected in 291/315 (92.4%) patients with anogenital warts and in 138/152 (90.8%) patients with laryngeal papillomas, indicating that the great majority of both tumors could be prevented with prophylactic quadrivalent vaccine. The HPV-6 gender-specific distribution in both anogenital warts and laryngeal papillomas was not statistically significant. In contrast, HPV-11 was found almost three times more often in males than in females with anogenital warts (16.5% vs. 6.3%; P = 0.008), with a gender neutral HPV-11 type distribution in laryngeal papillomas. The overall HPV DNA prevalence in anogenital warts was significantly different from that in laryngeal papillomas (97.1% vs. 91.4%; P = 0.01). In the first comparison of the HPV-6/HPV-11 type-specific distribution between patients suffering from anogenital warts and laryngeal papillomas with the same geographic and ethnic background, a significant imbalance in tumor-specific distribution of HPV-6 and HPV-11 was identified: HPV-6 was statistically more often present in anogenital warts than in laryngeal papillomas (79.0% vs. 59.2%; P = 0.000013), whereas HPV-11 was statistically more frequent in laryngeal papillomas than in anogenital warts (28.9% vs. 12.4%; P = 0.00003).