Visitors and news

This publication is an important update of the previous IARC Handbook on cervical cancer screening (Volume 10, published in 2005). Volume 18 provides evidence-based evaluations of the effectiveness of five methods of cervical cancer screening in reducing cervical cancer incidence and/or mortality. The Working Group also reviewed the body of evidence and provided conclusive statements on the comparative effectiveness of those screening methods that are established to reduce cervical cancer incidence and/or mortality. In addition, the Working Group provided an updated literature review on the determinants of participation in screening programmes and on emerging techniques, as well as on the different categories of women at differential risk and the surveillance strategies for such women.
View the publication.

Authors of this article published in BMC Cancer, reported a pattern of care study at two premier-most public-funded oncology centers in Morocco to evaluate delays in care continuum and adherence to internationally accepted treatment guidelines of cervical cancer. This study highlighted there is room for significant improvement through reduction in delays in care and better adherence to internationally recommended treatment guidelines. Increased use of chemoradiation and brachytherapy will improve survival further.
View the article.

Dr Manikanda Sakthivel will work with IARC supervisor and other scientists to plan a protocol and data collection tools for a collaborative study between his Institute and IARC to evaluate the value of navigation in improving cancer screening participation in India. He will also get an opportunity to learn sample size calculation from our statistician. The training will help in his future career as a public health expert with special interest in cancer screening.

Within the framework of the project, Evaluation of a portable ultrasound device to triage the women positive on clinical breast examination by trained healthcare workers and medical officers, organized in Kannur, India by the Malabar Cancer Society in collaboration with BARC and IARC, staff involved in this project were trained to perform breast ultrasound on CBE positive women and learn to differentiate features of benign breast lesions from the suspicious and malignant ones.

In collaboration with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (New Delhi, India), the Cancer Institute (WIA) Chennai (Chennai, India), and the Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute (CNCI) (Kolkata, India), the Early Detection, Prevention & Infections Branch/IARC organized today the SAVE-Cervix PI meeting in Kolkata, India to discuss about the development and evaluation of an artificial intelligence (AI) image recognition device to improve cervical pre-cancer screening and management in low- and middle-income countries. View the SAVE-Cervix research summary page.

New article was published in the Journal of International Journal of Cancer. The triage performance and predictive value of human gene methylation panel alone and with combination of HPV16/18 genotyping were evaluated based on a prospective cohort with 1,758 women with positive result for hrHPV on self-collected samples. The results revealed that the triage performance of the methylation panel alone or in combination with HPV16/18 had satisfactory balance between sensitivity and specificity. Moreover, the negative result of above triage conferred the substantial low 3-year risk of incident CIN 2+. View the article.

The ACCI project constitutes the implementation of an affordable, equitable and integrated multi-cancer early detection package to improve cancer outcomes in resource-constrained settings in three different states in India.

The Screening Group organized this meeting for all principal investigators, programme managers, and key collaborators from the study sites involved in this project, to discuss Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) recommendations, study progress, and recent findings.

Drs. Isabel Mosquera and Keitly Mensah have visited the county of Cluj, Romania, as part of the capacity assessment of cervical cancer screening related services in the CBIG-SCREEN project. They have conducted surveys in screening facilities and colposcopy and treatment facilities. This complements the information collected from the desk review and interviews with stakeholders, and will inform the capacity development response that will be prepared before the phase I of the study. Visit the CBIG-SCREEN project website: https://cbig-screen.eu/

SAGE’s review concluded that a single-dose Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine delivers solid protection against HPV, that is comparable to 2-dose or 3-dose regimens schedules. This could be a game-changer for the prevention of the disease; seeing more doses of the life-saving jab reach more girls. This new recommendation is based largely on research conducted by scientists from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) over more than a decade.
View the WHO news release published on 11/04/2022: One-dose Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine offers solid protection against cervical cancer