Human papillomavirus infections are very common in sexually active young women. Some HPV lesions lead to cervical cancer; many go away on their own. Researchers at the University of California–San Francisco followed adolescent and young women to find out how their HPV infections progressed.

What the researchers wanted to know: What is the chance that low-grade squamous intra-epithelial lesions (which come from papillomavirus infection) will go away on their own in adolescent and young women?

What they did: The researchers analyzed data from what will be a 10-year study of HPV infection. Women ages 13 to 22 who had tested positive for HPV infection at a family planning clinic between 1990 and 1994 were invited to take part in the study, if they hadn't been diagnosed with cervical lesions before. The women came in periodically for tests, including internal exams with an endoscope. For this article, the researchers looked only at 187 women whose first abnormality was these low-grade squamous intra-epithelial lesions, or LSIL.

What they found: Sixty-one percent of the low-grade lesions went away in a year, and 91 percent went away within three years. In three years, only six women, or 3 percent, had their low-grade lesions progress to high-grade lesions. The researchers conclude that there is no reason to monitor those low-grade lesions with colposcopy—using an endoscope to examine the vagina and cervix—since the lesions are usually benign and could be monitored using other methods.

What the study means to you: These low-grade lesions are nothing to get excited about in young women, the study suggests. Given that, the authors of an editorial published in the same issue of the Lancet write, colposcopy—which is no fun for anyone—is definitely inappropriate for adolescents who could be emotionally scarred by the experience and whose lesions will most likely go away on their own.

Caveats: The researchers didn't analyze data from women who already had high-grade lesions when the study started. That probably wouldn't have made a difference, though.

Find out more: Colposcopy, from the National Women's Health Information Center. The National Cancer Institute has lots of information on cervical cancer.

Read the article: Moscicki, A.-B. et al. "Regression of Low-Grade Squamous Intra-Epithelial Lesions in Young Women." The Lancet. Nov. 6, 2004, Vol. 364, pp. 1678–1683.

Abstract online: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov