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Do You Need a Pap Test this Year: Or Not? Or A Different Test

Women have known that early detection is the key to successful prevention of cervical cancer, now that is for us that have not yet had a Gardasil vaccine. For those lucky women, prevention truly means not acquiring the condition at all. But for the rest early detection is still the best strategy. So the question is do you need a pap test. If you are over the age of 21 it's time to begin on a screening program. And for women who are offered pap tests the new study results indicate that the best test may be to detect the disease itself: the HPV infection. And to actually get tested for the most serious types of HPV. HPV genotype testing is the new buzz word in cervical cancer prevention. Finding out if you in fact have HPV 16 or 18 is the most important test you can have. It has not be yet determined who can skip the pap and just get the HPV testing, but it is thought that this is going to be the best test for the future. Especially for young women who were vaccinated prior to knowing whether they had previously contracted the HPV disease, genotype testing may be able to predict how protected they really were! And perhaps some day some women won't need pap smears at all! Read the results and tell me what you think about the future of pap smears..
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/issue/current

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