Assessment of HPV  in oral leukoplakia  utilizing a screening test

Method: 22  patients gave informed consent to participate in the study. The inclusion criteria for the oral leukoplakia patients were  : being newly diagnosed cases and not undergoing biopsy intervention for their lesion before sampling. The lesions consisted of different clinical types of oral leukoplakia (homogeneous, granular, speckled ) and the diagnosis confirmed by biopsy and histological examination. The method was non-invasive and the samples were obtained by scraping the lesion site .  HPV DNA was detected in scraped samples and was differentiated in high risk and low risk genotypes of HPV by the use of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and subsequent reverse hybridization with sequence-specific oligonucleotide probes.

Result:  From 22 patients with oral leukoplakia lesions analyzed, 54% of the superficial scraped samples were HPV DNA positive . In 5 cases was detected HPV- 16 and HPV- 18 (22,72%), in 5 cases was detected  HPV high risk band (HPV16,18,31,33,35,39,45,51,52,53,56,58,59,66,68,73,82) (22,72%), whereas  in 2 cases  HPV low risk band  (6,11,40,,42,43,44) (9,09%). Consequently  HPV -16, -18 were the most frequent genotypes detected, in oral leukoplakia specimens.

Conclusion: Our findings indicated that HPV -16 and -18 were the most frequent genotypes detected in the oral leukoplakia specimens, when using a superficial oral scraping technique.Our sampling procedure may allow more accurate diagnosis of HPV infection, and may also represent a reliable method to investigate the biological characteristics of HPV infection.Future reports will highlight the effects of the variations in the sampling procedure and transportation medium.