Sexual abuse victims at elevated risk for warts, HPV

**Unger ER. Pediatrics. 2011;doi:10.1542/peds.2010-2247.**

Children who were evaluated for sexual abuse were more likely to have genital warts and genital papillomavirus than those who were evaluated for other reasons, according to a study published online.

Elizabeth R. Unger, MD, PhD, of the CDC’s Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, and colleagues reviewed data from 576 children, aged 6 months to 13 years, most of whom (n=534) had been evaluated for sexual abuse. The study patients were from eight sites in Atlanta, Houston, Harrisburg, Pa., and New York City.

Unger and colleagues said 14 of the patients who had been evaluated for sexual abuse had genital warts, and 61 had one or more types of HPV, compared with only 1.3% in those who were evaluated for reasons other than sexual abuse.

“The HPV prevalence was much higher than that of chlamydia (3.1%) and gonorrhea (3.3%) in female participants evaluated for [child sexual abuse] in the same study population,” the researchers wrote, adding that HPV detection increased along with certainty of abuse.

The incidence of infection also correlated with age, as researchers reported that children aged older than 10 years had an incidence of 20.6% compared with 5.6% in the group that was evaluated for other reasons.

The researchers reported that their study findings did not support routine testing of HPV DNA for sexual abuse victims because “risk in participants without evidence of confirmed sexual abuse was significantly lower but not zero, suggesting that the findings of this study do not support the routine use of HPV DNA testing.”

Disclosure: Funding was provided by the CDC’s Office of Women’s Health and by the National Center for Infectious Diseases’ Office of Minority and Women’s Health. The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.

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