Menstrual pad, a cervical cancer screening tool, a population-based study in rural India
Budukh A, Palayekar V, Maheshwari A, et al.European Journal of Cancer Prevention · 2018DOI 10.1097/cej.0000000000000387
In plain language
In two rural populations in Maharashtra, India, where many women use old cloth during menstruation, used menstrual pads from women aged 30 to 50 were tested for HPV and compared with the Hybrid Capture 2 test, with colposcopy for women who tested positive and a random sample of those who tested negative. Pad testing detected HPV with 83% and 67% sensitivity and 99% and 88% specificity in the two populations, and detected CIN with 83% sensitivity and 95% specificity.
Key numbers
- 365
- Women in one population who gave used pads for PCR testing
- 83%
- Sensitivity for CIN (95% CI 0.44–0.97)
- 95%
- Specificity for CIN
What it means
Cloth and pads used in daily life in a low-resource setting carried enough HPV DNA for testing, which makes the approach attractive where speculum-based screening is hard to reach. Performance differed between the two populations.
What it does not show
Few women had CIN, so the sensitivity estimate is uncertain (95% CI 44% to 97%). Only women who tested positive, a random 10% of negatives and volunteers had colposcopy, so some disease may have gone unseen.
How to cite
Budukh A, Palayekar V, Maheshwari A, Deodhar K, Purwar P, Bagal S, et al. Menstrual pad, a cervical cancer screening tool, a population-based study in rural India. European Journal of Cancer Prevention. 2018;27(6):546-552. doi:10.1097/cej.0000000000000387