Human papilloma virus in lung and esophageal carcinoma. Molecular pathology of Japan and Asia

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Human papilloma virus (HPV) is causally associated with carcinoma of the uterine cervix, genital organs, and anus. On the other hand, its relation to the lung and esophageal carcinomas has not been clarified yet, since the detection rates of HPV have been variable in the institutions and regions. In the present study, we investigated the HPV infection in lung and esophageal carcinomas in Japan and Asian countries in order to clarify the significance of HPV infection and to evaluate the regional differences.In situ hybridization and PCR detection of HPV-DNA were applied to the formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded specimens of lung and esophageal carcinomas (total 483 samples), which were collected from four institutions of Japan (Tokyo, Kochi, Kagoshima and Okinawa), two institutions of Korea and each of Taiwan and Singapore.The presence of HPV-DNA was demonstrated in low frequencies, such as 6.9% of squamous cell carcinomas of the lung (12/174), 7.1% of adenocarcinomas of the lung (9/127) and 8.8% of esophageal carcinomas (16/182). The positive signals for HPV were sparsely distributed in some of the nuclei of the carcinoma cells in positive cases. The finding suggests that this sparse distribution is one of causes for the variability of the frequencies of the HPV infection in the previous reports.The positive frequencies in lung squamous cell carcinomas were 8.1, 8.6, 5.6 and 0% in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, respectively. The frequencies in lung adenocarcinomas were 5.0, 7.1, 13.3 and 0%, respectively. In esophageal carcinoma, the positive rates were 10.5, 8.0 and 6.4% in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, respectively.When the frequencies were compared among the regions in Japan, the highest frequency was observed in that of esophageal carcinomas of Kagoshima (24.1%, 7/29), which was statistically significant. Otherwise, there was no regional difference in lung carcinomas.