Requiring all HIV-infected women to undergo pap smears every six months to test for the papillomavirus that causes cervical cancer may not be necessary, researchers said on Tuesday.
U.S. government guidelines call for HIV-infected women to have pap smears every six months, creating a significant cost especially since AIDS-fighting drugs are allowing such patients to live longer, they said.
The new report says women who initially test negative for the papillomavirus after an HIV diagnosis can reduce the frequency of the pap smears.
Cutting the testing frequency to every three years, as with healthy women, would lessen the burden on patients and their doctors, said the report published in this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The conclusion needs to be confirmed in a larger study, wrote author Tiffany Harris of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, who based her findings on 855 HIV-positive female patients and another 343 HIV-free patients.
As many as 950,000 people in the United States and 39 million people around the world are infected with HIV, and 3.1 million died of AIDS last year, according to health authorities.