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Human papilloma virus (HPV) infection leads to the development of head and neck lesions but offers better prognosis in malignant Indian patients

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Abstract

Head and neck cancers constitute a multifactorial global disease burden and are associated with human papilloma virus (HPV) as a possible risk factor. The aim of the study is to understand the relationship between HPV and the development of head and neck lesions in Indian patients. To this end, frequency of HPV was assessed in relation to different demographic and etiological features and correlated with patient survival. The prevalence of HPV significantly increased from mild dysplastic lesions (43.6%) to head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) stage IV (68.5%) with HPV 16 being pre-dominant in both dysplasia (43.8%) and HNSCC (61.5%). Similar trend was observed in increasing grades of the tumour. In invasive lesions, patients aged below the median age of onset showed significantly higher occurrence of HPV than those above it. Patients harbouring HPV showed a significantly better survival irrespective of age of onset. Likewise, better survival was observed in tobacco habit negative/HPV-positive patients, and as reflected in both univariate and multivariate analysis. Majority of the HPV 16-positive samples showed moderate/high nuclear expression of HPV E6 and E7 proteins in tumours and respective basal layer of adjacent normal tissues. Thus, our data indicate that frequent HPV infection, along with tobacco habit, is a pre-requisite factor for the development of HNSCC of Indian patients but offers a better survival even during tobacco usage, implicating its diagnostic and prognostic importance.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support for this work was provided by grants from Department of Biotechnology, (BT/PR/5524/Med/14/649/2004), Government of India, to Dr. CK Panda and Dr. S Roychoudhury, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research-Project (IAP-001), Government of India to Dr. S Roychoudhury and CSIR-NET SRF Fellowship, Government of India, (Grant No. 09/30 (0056)/2010-EMR-I) to Dr. S. Sarkar. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors declare no conflicts of interest in relation to authorship and/or publication of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Oncogene Regulation, Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, 37, S.P. Mukherjee Road, Kolkata, 700026, India

    Shreya Sarkar & Chinmay Kumar Panda

  2. Department of Surgical Oncology, Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, Kolkata, India

    Neyaz Alam, Jayanta Chakraborty & Jaydip Biswas

  3. Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute, Kolkata, India

    Syam Sundar Mandal

  4. Basic Research, Saroj Gupta Cancer Centre and Research Institute, Kolkata, India

    Susanta Roychoudhury

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  1. Shreya Sarkar
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Correspondence to Chinmay Kumar Panda.

Electronic supplementary material

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430_2017_502_MOESM1_ESM.docx

Supplementary Table 1: List of primers. Primers used for the detection and typing of HPV 16 and 18, long with the PCR conditions used for the study (DOCX 12 KB)

430_2017_502_MOESM2_ESM.docx

Supplementary Table 2: Correlation between PCR positivity and protein expression. Association between HPV 16 PCR positivity and expression of HPV 16 oncoproteins E7 and E6 by immunohistochemistry. HPV 16-negative specimens lacked the expression of the oncoproteins, while positive specimens showed concordance with proteins expression. Correlation was analysed by Odds Ratio and probability (2-tailed) p < 0.05 was considered significant (DOCX 16 KB)

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Sarkar, S., Alam, N., Chakraborty, J. et al. Human papilloma virus (HPV) infection leads to the development of head and neck lesions but offers better prognosis in malignant Indian patients. Med Microbiol Immunol 206, 267–276 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00430-017-0502-5

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