IARC researchers have made a study, the results of which were presented at the AACR 102nd Annual Meeting 2011 held from April 2- April6.

International Agency for Research on Cancer researchers made a study on the lung cancer patients and found that people suffering with lung cancer are more prone to have several high-risk forms of HPV (i. e. human papilloma virus) antibodies as compared to those who did not have lung cancer. The report showed a substantial increase in HPV antibodies in lung cancer patients.

The study was done by Devasena Anantharaman, Ph. D., postdoctoral fellow in the Genetic Epidemiology Group at the IARC in Lyon, France, and his colleagues, who studies 1,633 lung cancer cases and discovered the results with the help of serological tests that were done on the patients to determine the presence of several high-risk and low-risk types of HPV. They found that the lung-cancer-free controls showcases low prevalence of antibodies to all types of HPV tested whereas in the lung cancer patients, antibodies to proteins in eight types of high-risk HPV were significantly increased.

Smoking has been concluded as the strongest risk factor to cause lung cancer but was not accounted for this effect as the results were consistently made in current smokers, former smokers and those who never smoked.