Story at a glance
- Rates of cervical cancer have increased among women aged 30 to 34 over the past two decades.
- However, rates for women in all other age groups have steadily declined or remained level.
- Previous research has shown a decline in cervical cancer screening rates among younger women.
Cervical cancer rates among millennial women rose by 2.5 percent each year from 2012 to 2019, reversing years of declining incidence in this age group, new data show.
Following declines from 2001 to 2012, incidence of cervical cancer grew to 11.60 per 100,000 women aged 30 to 34 in 2019, according to study findings published in JAMA.
“For the last two years, we have been trying to understand why the continuous decline in cervical cancer stopped in 2012 and why we have reached a critical turning point,” said co-author Ashish Deshmukh of the Medical University of South Carolina in a release.
Results are based on a dataset that covers more than 98 percent of the population in the United States. Only cases of hysterectomy-corrected cervical cancer were included in the study.
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Between 2001 and 2019, rates of cervical cancer continued to decline in younger and older age groups, and incidence declined overall. Rates remained relatively stable for women between ages 35 and 54.
“What’s very surprising is that the [millennial] rates increased in non-Hispanic White women, Hispanic women and other ethnic groups but not in non-Hispanic Black women,” Deshmukh added.
The majority of cervical cancer cases are caused by human papillomavirus (HPV), the most common sexually transmitted infection.
However, vaccines against the infection are effective in preventing cervical cancer. One study published in 2021 found cancer rates were 87 percent lower in women in their 20s who received the vaccine between ages 12 and 13, compared with those who were never vaccinated.
“In the era of the overall decline in cancer incidence, cancers caused by HPV are unfortunately rising,” Deshmukh said.
Rates of HPV vaccine uptake were low prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but they dropped further during the crisis as many Americans skipped routine medical care.
The increase in cases among millennial women could be due to a true increase in incidence, or higher rates of early detection. Increases were recorded in rates of localized and regional disease, along with both squamous cell cervical carcinoma and cervical adenocarcinoma, researchers found.
Squamous cell carcinoma is largely detected through screening, Deshmukh said, and data show screening rates have drastically decreased in recent years, especially among those aged 21 to 29.
“It is critically important to determine if the increase in cervical cancer incidence in young women is due to the decrease in screening rates in women aged 21 to 29 years or whether it is due to the introduction of more effective HPV testing in recent years. However, we do know that we need future research to understand this problem thoroughly,” said Deshmukh.
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