Hello!

I am new to the group. My husband has gone through first week of chemo and radiation. Things aren't too awful yet and we are trying to remain as positive and focused as possible.

One thing bothering me that I have been unable to talk about is the HPV+ diagnosis. I just wondered if any other spouses became concerned about getting cancer themselves. I have never had an abnormal pap smear. Now, it seems like every tickle in my throat or ear makes me worry. Has anyone else had this anxiety?

Hello there. My husband received the same DX. The doctors at Hopkins told us that 95% of sexual active people have had or have HPV. The immune system of the vast majority of folks rid the body of the virus. A very small percentage of people develop problems associated with the virus. They also said that it can take years before there is any problem.

We just finished treatments and I am very pleased to report, my husband is doing well. I know we have to watch and wait for a while, but for now, all is well. Good luck to you and your husband.

There were studies done on this, and appears that spouses, and long term partners of HPV related head and neck cancer are not a increased risk of oral HPV infection.

http://oralcancernews.org/wp/no-inc...of-people-with-hpv-related-oral-cancers/

Good luck with treatment.

OCF helped pay for the work by Dr. D'Souza which definitively put the idea of spouses being at risk to bed for ever. Her peer reviewed published work is available in scientific form on the HPV pages of the OCF main site. But the net of it is what we have pretty much always known. People in the general population that develop HPV+ oral cancers are about .9 percent of all those infected, which is the vast majority of the US population according to the CDC and the NHAINES trial which OCF has been part of since 2008. From those studies we know that about 25 million people have a high risk HPV 16 infection orally on any given day in the US. So a person's genetic make up is the determiner of development of an oral cancer, not exposure to the oncogenic HPV16 virus which dominates oral cancers. It is also a virus which is ubiquitous in our society, and everyone is going to get it no matter who you are and who you sleep with. You will never know you had the infection, and you will clear it without ever knowing that you cleared it. This is why it is relatively unknown to most Americans.

I don't think this is news to any researcher, but we wanted the study to be done to belay any anxiety in spouses. There are 5 known cases EVER of a spouse and their husband/wife both getting oral cancers from HPV. NOTE: this is a function of genetic susceptibility and not the person that they are married to and that person's disease. So even if one of them had been married to someone else that did not have HPV+ oral cancer, they would have still developed it since they were exposed early in their lives, and they have an immune system that does not recognize the virus as a threat. My wife has been HPV16 positive off and on for at least two decades, in spite of me developing an oral cancer, she has never developed even dysplastic tissue from the infections which her body always clears in about 18 months.

Wow, thanks so much for the information you provided! I did catch some information somewhere on the genetics(I've tried to read anything I can find on medical college and other reputable sites). Smoking was also a factor in this case.

With everything presented there are so many theories on how it's contracted and how long before it becomes cancer. I've never had any sign of the virus either. I'm so thankful to have found this foundation and forum for discussion. I truly appreciate everyone's responses!

So the follow up smoking /HPV article you refer to is not so interesting, and has been called junk science by so many. Smokers do get more HPV infections, that isn't really news - they get more of every kind of infection because of the tobacco's actions on their systems. But even if it facilitates more HPV infections, it has absolutely no bearing on where those infections cascade into oral cancers or not.

This is the really important point, and why this bit of research, from good people, to us really means nothing. I don't care how many times I get an HPV infection as long as it never becomes something else. Developing a cancer from it is still a function of genetic make up of the individual (and their resulting immune system) and has nothing to do with tobacco making getting the infection easier. In many science article you really have to read what it is stating, and what this one states is about rates of infections, which has nothing to do with rates of converting to a malignancy. You can't connect those two dots.