Manjunath M.R.1, Sheetal2
BACKGROUND
A long pathological process for investigation of precursor lesion squamous
intraepithelial lesion (SIL) leads to invasive cervical cancer. This SIL can be
detected much earlier before the lesion progresses to invasive cancer. For greater
than fifty years, screening for cancer cervix was done by conventional scrape
smears and stained by Papanicolaou [Pap] stain but conventional Pap smears
(CPAP) have been reported to have low sensitivity. To overcome these drawbacks
manual liquid-based cytology [MLBC] was introduced. The objective of this study
was to screen females for cervical cancer using CPAP and MLBC techniques and
compare the results of these techniques.
METHODS
Cervical cytology samples were obtained from 120 non-pregnant females through
specialised Uprep cytobrush with a detachable head. Thus, obtained samples were
first smeared onto a clean glass slide for CPAP smear, and the whole head to
cytobrush was dropped into the specialised Uprep liquid preservative medium and
processed by using Uprep Cytospin machine to obtain MLBC smears. Both the
smears were stained by conventional Pap stain and reported according to 2014
Bethesda system.
RESULTS
In this study, the CPAP method had a greater number of unsatisfactory smears
than that of MLBC method which was statistically significant. MLBC identified more
number of intraepithelial lesions when compared to CPAP and MLBC had an
increased detection rate [IDR] of 73.68 % over CPAP.
CONCLUSIONS
Analysis of our results showed that MLBC had more advantages over CPAP. Since
the cost effective MLBC has an improved rate of detection of abnormal lesions,
MLBC can be used as a routine technique for screening of cancer cervix in India.
Also, MLBC offers an important advantage of performing both human
papillomaviruses deoxyribonucleic acid (HPV DNA) test and cytological analysis on
a single sample.
