Cancer incidence among women

Despite the progress that continues to be made in medicine, the incidence of cancer among women continues to rise. Cancer is sometimes referred to by some as a disease of civilisation, due to the fact that many factors such as environmental pollution, a fast pace of life, chronic stress, a diet low in antioxidants and others are likely to predispose to the appearance of pre-cancerous or cancerous lesions.

One of the most common cancers in women is cervical cancer. In Poland, it ranks second in terms of incidence among all cancers diagnosed in women.

In the case of cervical cancer, and not only, time plays an important role. The sooner the first symptoms indicating that cancer may be developing from a lesion are noticed, the better the chances of being able to fully defeat it. It is therefore important to use appropriate methods for the early detection of cervical dysplasia as well as pre-invasive cancer and to undertake prompt treatment. Such treatment gives patients the chance of a complete cure.

The scale of the problem has led to the fact that in many countries, including Poland, it is becoming increasingly popular to introduce a number of widely available prophylactic programmes that enable abnormal cytology results to be picked up quickly and thus reduce both the incidence of and mortality from cervical cancer.

Abnormalities of the cervical epithelium can be encountered in any age group and many of the lesions detected are viral(H. pyloriV - Human Papilloma Virus) or bacterial (e.g.Chlamydia Trachomatis) in origin. Prophylaxis should therefore be extended to all women presenting themselves at the doctor's surgery. The need to lower the lower age limit is related to the increasingly earlier sexual initiation among young people, which carries the risk of earlier exposure to oncogenic agents.

Prevention

Prevention includes, among other things, the promotion of information about the disease, its prevention and treatment, as well as a preventive examination that includes:

• gynaecological examination,
• a speculum examination,
• a cytological smear, which is a basic screening test.

The result of a cytological examination is not always sufficient to make a correct diagnosis and requires colposcopic and histopathological verification. The combination of cytology and colposcopy gives approximately 95% accuracy in the diagnosis of cervical abnormalities, and the best diagnostic results in the diagnosis of early epithelial lesions are provided by complementing cytology with a comprehensive virological examination, particularly for highly ionogenic viruses.

Colposcopy is only a complementary examination to cytological tests and does not allow a final diagnosis to be made; it can only suggest pathology. For a complete diagnosis, histopathological verification of the specimen taken during targeted biopsy is necessary to differentiate between invasive carcinoma and dysplastic lesions.