HPV vaccination is shown to protect against HPV infection, genital warts, and high grade precancerous cervical lesions. However, the vaccination’s ultimate goal is to prevent invasive cervical cancer, which has yet to be determined. As such, this study utilised a nationwide registry from Sweden to analyse the association between HPV vaccination and invasive cervical cancer risk.
The study results demonstrated HPV vaccination was associated with a substantial reduction in invasive cervical cancer risk. The prospective study was limited by the inability to account for confounding lifestyle and health factors of the participants. HPV-vaccinated women could generally be healthier than unvaccinated women resulting in a healthy volunteer selection bias. Therefore, the participants who had the HPV vaccination may also not smoke and use oral contraceptives, which mitigated their risk for invasive cervical cancer unrelated to the vaccine. Nonetheless, this study’s results are significant, and its findings underscore the ultimate benefit of the HPV vaccine.