An epidemiological study to identify the risk factors with two different types of controls in high-grade cervical lesions including invasive cancer.

ABSTRACT

A multidisciplinary study on pre-cancerous and early cancerous lesions of uterine cervix was carried out at our Institute from which the subjects (cases and one group of control) for the present study were selected with the objective to identify the possible risk factors related to high-grade cervical lesions including invasive cancer through an epidemiological study by selecting two different types of controls and to assess the feasibility whether the cancers of other organs could be taken as controls at the same time studying the risk factors associated with cervical cancer. One group of control was women with negative Pap smear and second group of control was the women with breast cancer but negative Pap smear. A total of 100 biopsy-proven cases of high-grade cervical intraepithelial lesions and Invasive cancer were recruited. The results of the study show that some of the risk factors associated with the cervical cancer get exaggerated when breast cancer cases were used as controls because risk factors of both cancers are opposite to each other. So it is concluded that in order to remove any bias, normal hospital controls or controls selected from multiple cancers should be taken to study the risk factors involved in cervical carcinogenesis.