Kaiser Permanente Data Provides Strong Evidence for Continued Value of Combined Pap and H...(and saving lives. Kaiser Permane...),Health

Kaiser Permanente Northern California performs HPV testing with the digene HPV Test and provides Pap and HPV cotesting to its female patients age 30 and older to better identify those at risk of developing cervical cancer. The digene HPV Test detects the presence of high-risk types of HPV, the primary cause of cervical cancer. The test is recommended for use along with the Pap to screen women age 30 and older, the group most at risk of developing cervical cancer, as well as for follow-up evaluation in women whose Pap results are inconclusive.

"We recognize that women who test positive for carcinogenic HPV and negative by cytology are at an elevated risk for cervical pre-cancer and cancer compared with women who test negative on both," the study authors write, suggesting that future clinical research will need to focus on identifying "the best strategies for managing women who test positive for carcinogenic HPV and negative by cytology."

While the Pap test relies on a laboratory technician to manually look for cell changes that may signal cervical disease, QIAGEN's digene HPV Test, which uses the company's proprietary Hybrid Capture 2 (hc2) technology, uses advanced molecular technology to identify the presence of the genetic code (DNA) of 13 high-risk, cancer causing types of HPV. More than 40 million tests for carcinogenic HPV have been performed with the digene HPV Test. FDA-approved since 1999, the digene HPV Test has been published in more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles and studied in clinical trials involving more than 825,000 women worldwide. It is quickly becoming a new standard-of-care for cervical cancer screening and is recognized as t
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