Koilocyte Counts Can Predict HIV Status in Infected Women.(Brief Article)

2001 JAN 31 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Epidemiologists in Italy have presented evidence that women with human papillomavirus (HPV) lesions containing a high quantity of koilocytes - raisin-like squamous cells that are the hallmark of HPV - are likely to also be infected with HIV.

M. Branca and colleagues with the Istituto Superiore di Sanita in Rome conducted a study to "investigate the relationship between specific cytopathologic changes, koilocyte counts and human papillomavirus types in HIV positive and negative women," and described their results in the journal Acta Cytologica.

Branca et al. examined 459 women participating in a multicenter study on the early diagnosis of neoplasia in AIDS patients. Of the study cohort, 97 women suffered from squamous intraepithelial lesions (SILs) from which cervical smears were taken for analysis ("Using the number of koilocytes to predict HIV serostatus in women with HPV-associated SIL," Acta Cytol, 2000;44(6):1000-1004).

They found that women who were infected with HIV were four times more likely to have squamous lesions than HIV negative women, although the presence of HPV DNA was present in similar proportions of patients in both groups of women.

A relatively high number of koilocytes was strongly positively correlated with HIV infection, study data showed. Using the presence of eight or more of these ...