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Rolla, ND | Cervical cancer is almost all caused by a couple strains of human papilloma virus, as such it is basically a complication of a venereal disease spread by sexual intercourse with infected individuals.
There is now a vaccine to protect against some of the strains and thus greatly reduce the chance of ever having cervical cancer a vaccine versus going through cancer treatments seems like a no-brainer but the vaccine must be taken when young to prevent problems years later and it has become a bit of a political football.
Cervical cancer usually develops very slowly over years.
Pap smears are used to detect the precancerous changes so they can be treated before cancer results.
Most cervical cancer develops when women go for years without pap smears or they ignore abnormal pap smear results.
Even most cervical cancer is relatively easy to treat.
At first simply the affected tissue needs to be removed and does not require a hysterectomy. It may be removed with a heated loop of wire, by freezing or with a laser.
As the cancer advances a hysterectomy becomes necessary. In the old days they would take the ovaries too but that is rarely done anymore and really is not necessary. Just when a hysterectomy is necessary is quite a topic of disagreement among doctors. Part of the reason is if you miss the first time, recurrence of cancer seems much harder to treat. So some doctors push hyserectomy pretty agressively, others are kind of against it except when clearly necessary now.
As it contines to get more advanced it may become necessary to treat it by basically removing everything in the area, this is pretty extreme and causes lifetime problems.
It can spread to other organs but doesn't usually until quite advanced. If it's spread then you are talking radiation, and so on and prognosis is often not good.
Precancerous cure rate basically 100%. 5 year survivals when it hasn't gotten past cervix around 90%. Goes down significantly after that.
I would recommend going to someone that deals with this all the time. Nothing seems to help the practice of medicine better than lots of practice.
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Cervical cancer
