Multiple primary cancers and HPV infection: are they related?

Abstract

Multiple primary cancers have been reported with increasing frequency in recent years, but the presence of foreign DNA sequences of infectious agents in tumours arising in the same patient has so far not been investigated. We report a case of a patient with Hodgkin's lymphoma, an "in situ" cervix carcinoma and an adenocarcinoma of the right and left mammary gland. In all the tumour samples we detected the presence of DNA genomic sequences of Papillomavirus type 16. Our results suggest that HPV infection may be an exogenous risk factor even in second primary tumours of non-epithelial origin.