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Abstract
Human papillomavirus (HPV) is composed of a particularly heterogeneous family of DNA viruses, which has gained much attention in recent years due to the discoveries of Professor Harald zur Hausen, who first identified a connection between HPV and cervical cancer. Professor Harald zur Hausen, the ‘Father of HPV Virology’, was the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize. HPV can be transmitted through physical contact via autoinoculation or fomites, sexual contact, as well as vertically from the HPV-positive mother to her newborn, causing subclinical or clinical infections. In infancy and childhood, HPV-associated clinical infections include skin warts, genital warts and juvenile recurrent respiratory papillomatosis, while cervical squamous intraepithelial lesions have also been reported among adolescent girls. To date, several research teams, worldwide, have extensively investigated HPV from the paediatric point of view. This primitive effort has been performed before the recent great expansion of paediatric HPV research due to the vaccination programmes against HPV, which were introduced into clinical practice in 2006. In this review article, we present a brief overview of paediatric HPV research after the first report in 1978 involving children in the research of HPV until the time point of this great expansion. In the future, it is expected that further unresolved issues will be addressed and clarified, as the paediatric story of HPV remains a challenging research target.
Highlights
Human papillomavirus (HPV) is composed of a heterogeneous family of DNA viruses, which has gained much attention in recent years due to the discoveries of Professor Harald zur Hausen, who first identified a connection between HPV and cervical cancer
Despite the fact that skin and genital warts have been considered infectious since this early period, the development of cervical cancer due to infection was only suspected in the 19th century A.C. by an Italian scientist from Asiago, Italy, the surgeon Antonio Domenico Rigoni-Stern [9]
Papanicolaou [a brief referral to his life is presented in the article by Mammas and Spandidos [10]] observed precancerous HPV-associated lesions in vaginal smears collected from females, an observation which led to the development of the Pap smear test [11,12]
Summary
The infectious cause of warts in children was known by the end of the 19th century [16], initial studies on children using molecular hybridization techniques were performed in the end of the 1970s. Soon after the report in 1988 by Steinberg [23] addressing the transmission of HPV to the fetus, a number of studies investigated the perinatal modes of HPV transmission in childhood [25,29] These studies supported a vertical transmission mechanism of HPV in children based on the presence of HPV DNA in asymptomatic neonates in oral and genital samples at or shortly after birth [25]. In 2000, Rice et al [36] reported the presence of HPV in oral samples obtained from healthy children, while other researchers documented tonsillar tissue as a reservoir of HPV DNA [38,39,40] These findings attracted the attention of Reuters Health, raising questions concerning the modes of HPV transmission in childhood [53]. This hypothesis that children act as a reservoir of silent high risk HPV types, analogous to the Trojan horse in Greek mythology, requires further investigation
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