When analyses were adjusted for age, the association was not significant for rs9357152 but remained nominally significant for rs4243652 (OR 1.19, 95%CI 0.94–1.52; p = 0.19 for rs9357152 with invasive cervical cancer, OR 2.72, 95%CI 1.11–6.67; p = 0.03 for rs4243652 with adenocarcinoma).
These associations remained borderline significant after testing against different sets of controls. rs9357152 was found to be an eQTL for HLA-DRB1 in HPV-positive cervical tissues (p ANOVA = 0.0009), with the risk allele lowering mRNA levels.
While the fact that we were able to find evidence for both seropositivity variants as likely risk variants for cervical cancer is encouraging, the associations are marginally significant and do not survive correction for multiple testing of subgroups so that there is clearly a need for additional case-control studies on these variants in cohorts stratified by HPV type. 5 Conclusion Cervical cancer is the paradigm for a virally induced cancer, with disease severity and progression attributed to the viral load, host immune response, lesion persistence and infection recurrence.