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Cervical cancer facts

[00:00:00] Okay. It's January and it's Cervical Cancer Awareness Month. So we have to talk about so much. There's so many things to talk about. Let me give you some of the bullet points. Cervical cancer is not completely preventable, but is absolutely findable and fixable, meaning it is one of the cancers that we have a very good screening test for. 

By way of the pap smear test, it is one of the cancers that tends to be very slow growing, so the pap smear test, which is the screening. Can help find changes very early on before they actually progress into cancer, which gives us the opportunity to find and fix these abnormal cells. That is a massive opportunity that other cancers do not provide for us. 

That is also a luxury that we have in America where we have access to screening. There are still developing countries. That do not have that access. This is what your cervix looks like when your doctor looks inside your vagina. The opening is actually never that obviously open, but that is called the cervical oss, which means opening or mouth in Latin. 

And that is the area with something called a transformation zone, which is two areas [00:01:00] where two different area, two different cells come converge in this area around that opening. And that's where the abnormalities can lie from the HPV virus. So cervical cancer can be screened. Cervical cancer is caused by the HPV virus. 

The HPV virus is something that 80 to 90% of us have or will have in our lifetime if we've had any sexual contact. Do not freak out if you hear that you have the HPV virus, because having it does not mean you're gonna have cervical cancer. Again. 80 to 90% of us will have the virus in our lifetime, and only about 12,000 women per year in America are diagnosed with cervical cancer. 

Now that number can be. If more of us are vaccinated, and if more of us get our screening regularly of those patients who are vaccinated to decrease the odds of being exposed to many different strains of the virus and of those who are screened regularly, the odds of getting cervical cancer are very low. 

And if you do get it, you're catching it [00:02:00] so early that you will be cured. That is the most important take home message about this. Cervical cancer is actually one of the cancers that as gynecologists, we don't fear. Our patients listen to us if they come in regularly for screening, if they try to prevent getting it by getting vaccinated, if they decrease their smoking, because smoking allows the virus to do more onerous things, and if they absolutely accept that, they shouldn't be fearful of it because then we can collaborate, we can prevent avoidance, and we can actually really learn the things that we need to do Much more to talk about this week.