Tobacco- and alcohol-caused cancers respond to treatment than those caused by HPV.

Patients with cancer of the mouth and throat caused by a virus will have a better response to radiation therapy than patients whose cancer comes from smoking and drinking.

Although most patients with cancer of the mouth and throat have a long history of smoking and excess alcohol intake, there is a small group that has neither of these in their background.

These patients are often older and more likely to be women than the patients who have been smokers and drinkers. Recently it has been discovered that this small group of patients developed their cancers because of an infection with the human papillomavirus (HPV), the same virus thought to cause cancer of the cervix in women.

In a report in a recent issue of Cancer (Vol. 92, No. 4: 805-813), a group of Swiss doctors, led by Katja Lindel, MD, a radiation oncologist, looked at whether having HPV infection as the cause of the cancer made any difference.

They reviewed 99 patients that were referred to them for radiation treatment of their mouth and throat cancers. Special chemical analysis of the tissues removed by biopsy revealed that 14 patients had cancers infected with human papillomavirus.

The doctors then compared the response to radiation therapy of these patients to the response of patients without the virus infection and found that the virus-infected patients did much better. Eighty percent of the patients with the virus infection had the cancer eliminated from their mouth and throat by the radiation, compared to only 50% of the other patients.

It also appeared that these patients had a lower chance of the cancer returning and eventually causing their deaths, but there were too few patients for the doctors to be certain. The message that Lindel and her colleagues want to send is that some patients with throat and mouth cancers did not get their cancer because they smoked and drank alcohol, and these people may have a much better outlook than expected.