The prevalence of oral high-risk HPV infection in Indonesian oral squamous cell carcinoma patients.

Abstract

The objective of this study was to report the integrated observations of high-risk HPV-related oral squamous carcinoma (OSCC) at our national referral center for cancer, the Dharmais National Cancer Hospital (DNCH), Jakarta, from 2003 to 2013. Seventy-eight formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded specimens obtained from OSCC cases were collected from 2003 to 2013 DNCH archives and were included in this high-risk HPV (HR-HPV) study. Seventy-nine DNA samples from the normal oral mucosa of healthy individuals were obtained from the Oral Biology Laboratory DNA archives from 2001 to 2005. Glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase was used as a control to ensure the DNA integrity for the subsequent HPV DNA PCR detection. High-risk HPV16/18 DNA amplification was conducted by nested PCR using two pairs of primers that were designed specifically to identify the region of gene L1 HPV16 and the HPV16/18 region. A high prevalence of HPV16/18 was detected in OSCC cases (17.9%). HPV18 occurred more often than HPV16 (86%) among OSCC patients who were HPV positive. This result supports high HPV18 prevalence among Indonesian cervical cancer patients studied in 1995 and 2006. The prevalence of high-risk HPV remains low in the normal Indonesian population (3.8%), but HPV16 is consistently more frequently detected in non-cancer populations.