A new study has revealed that men who perform oral sex on their partners have a high risk of contracting a rare form of mouth or throat cancer.
Smokers who have had more than five sexual partners are at even greater risk of developing the cancer triggered by the human papilloma virus (HPV) – which is the main cause of cervical cancer.
However, scientists reassure that only 0.7 percent of men – seven in every 1,000 – will ever develop HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer in their lifetimes.
The risk was much lower among women, those who did not smoke, and those who had less than five oral sex partners in their lifetimes.
An estimated eight out of ten people will be infected with the HPV virus at some point in their lives.
There are hundreds of different types of HPV and while most are harmless around 12 can cause cancer.
HPV 16 or 18 triggers most cervical cancer while HPV16 most throat cancer.
It is transmitted to the mouth and throat mostly by performing oral sex and appears to cause about 70 percent of oropharyngeal cancers. These cancers appear at the back of the throat, base of the tongue, or tonsils.
Associate Professor Dr. Amber D’Souza at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore said:
“For these reasons, it would be useful to be able to identify healthy people who are most at risk of developing oropharyngeal cancer in order to inform potential screening strategies, if effective screening tests could be developed.
“Most people perform oral sex in their lives, and we found that oral infection with cancer-causing HPV was rare among women regardless of how many oral sex partners they had.
“Among men who did not smoke, cancer-causing oral HPV was rare among everyone who had less than five oral sex partners, although the chances of having oral HPV infection did increase with number of oral sexual partners, and with smoking.”
The study published in the journal Annals of Oncology, analysed behavior and medical records of 13,089 people aged 20 to 69 taking part in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) who had been tested for oral HPV infection.
It used the numbers of oropharyngeal cancer cases and deaths to predict the risk of cancer from oral HPV infection.
Oral infections with the dozen HPV types known to cause oropharyngeal cancer especially HPV 16 were present at low prevalence in every defined group in the study.
For example, women ages 20 to 69 had a frequency of infection of just over 1 percent, compared to 6 percent for men ages 20 to 69. Men ages 50 to 59 were most likely to have an infection at 8.1 percent of any age group.
Oral sex was clearly associated with a higher prevalence of infection, although the highest infection prevalence was seen only among men.
Women with 10 or more lifetime oral sex partners had a relatively low, 3.0 percent prevalence of infection, whereas for men with 10 or more lifetime oral sex partners the figure was 14.4 percent.
Prevalence of infection for those reporting zero or one-lifetime oral sex partner was consistently low, between 0 and 2.4 percent.
Smoking also was associated with higher oral HPV prevalence.
Prevalence was 14.9 percent among men who smoked and reported five or more lifetime oral sex partners, compared to less than half that – 7.3 percent for men who reported five or more lifetime oral sex partners but did not smoke.
Co-author associate professor Dr. Carole Fakhry at the Johns Hopkins Department of Otolaryngology said: “Currently there are no tests that could be used for screening people for oropharyngeal cancer.
“It is a rare cancer and for most healthy people the harms of screening for it would outweigh the benefits because of the problem of false positive test results and consequent anxiety.
“Our research shows that identifying those who have oral HPV infection does not predict their future risk of cancer well, and so screening based on detecting cancer-causing oral HPV infection would be challenging.
“However, we are carrying out further research of oral HPV infection in young healthy men to explore this further.
“Other research is being done on different biological markers and it is possible some of them could be used for oropharyngeal cancer screening in the future in some people; for example, they might be useful in men but not in women given their lower cancer risk.
“Some studies suggest people who have antibodies against cancer-causing types of HPV have an increased risk of HPV-related cancer, but these antibodies are very rare.
“Therefore, it is not yet clear whether they will be useful for screening. Presently, these tests are not commercially available, and are still in research labs only.”
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