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Although alcohol and tobacco use have long been recognized as major risk factors for oropharyngeal squamous-cell carcinoma, recent work has produced molecular evidence supporting a major role for human papillomavirus (HPV). Now, investigators in Baltimore have performed a case-control study to evaluate the strength of this association.
The researchers enrolled 100 patients with newly diagnosed oropharyngeal squamous-cell carcinoma from a longitudinal cohort study and 200 age- and sex-matched cancer-free controls from an outpatient otolaryngology clinical population. Most (86%) of the cancer patients were men.
Significant risk factors for cancer included history of squamous-cell carcinoma of the head or neck in a first-degree relative, poor or…