Concurrent HPV DNA testing and a visual inspection method for cervical precancer screening: A practical approach from Battor, Ghana

Cytology-based cervical cancer screening programs have been difficult to implement and scale up in developing countries. Thus, the World Health Organization recommends a ‘see and treat’ approach by way of hr-HPV testing and visual inspection. We aimed to evaluate concurrent HPV DNA testing and visual inspection in a real-world low-resource setting by comparing the detection rates of concurrent visual inspection with dilute acetic acid (VIA) or mobile colposcopy and hr-HPV DNA testing to standalone hr-HPV DNA testing (using the care HPV, GeneXpert, AmpFire, or MA-6000 platforms). We further compared their rates of loss to follow-up. This retrospective, descriptive cross-sectional study included all 4482 women subjected to cervical precancer screening at our facility between June 2016 and March 2022. The rates of EVA and VIA ‘positivity’ were 8.6% (95% CI, 6.7–10.6) and 2.1 (95% CI, 1.6–2.5), respectively, while the hr-HPV-positivity rate was 17.9% (95% CI, 16.7–19.0). Overall, 51 women in the entire cohort tested positive on both hr-HPV DNA testing and visual inspection (1.1%; 95% CI, 0.9–1.5), whereas a large majority of the women tested negative (3588/4482, 80.1%) for both and 2.1% (95% CI, 1.7–2.6) tested hr-HPV-negative but visual inspection ‘positive’. In total, 191/275 (69.5%) participants who tested hr-HPV positive on any platform, as a standalone test for screening, returned for at least one follow-up visit. In light of factors such as poor socioeconomic circumstances, additional transportation costs associated with multiple screening visits, and lack of a reliable address system in many parts of Ghana, we posit that standalone HPV DNA testing with recall of hr-HPV positives will be tedious for a national cervical cancer prevention program. Our preliminary data show that concurrent testing (hr-HPV DNA testing alongside visual inspection by way of VIA or mobile colposcopy) may be more cost-effective than recalling hr-HPV-positive women for colposcopy.