Could husbands catch their wives' cancer?

Cervical cancer is linked to a virus

Men married to women with cervical cancer appear to run a greater risk of developing certain cancers themselves.

This suggests that a sexually-transmitted virus may be a common contributory factor.

The massive Swedish study looked at more than 300,000 men - 6,839 of them had spouses with cervical cancer, and almost 3,000 had spouses with invasive cervical cancer.

When the rates of other types of cancer in the men was analysed, it was found that men who had wives with cervical cancer had a higher risk of both anal and penile cancer.

In couples where the woman's cervical cancer was confined to the cervix - the neck of the womb - the overall number of anal cancers was one and three-quarter times the number expected normally.

In couples where the woman's cervical cancer had invaded beyond the cervix, there were almost double the expected rate of anal cancers among the husbands, and one and a half times the expected rate of penile cancers.

For husbands with wives who had invasive cancer, there were also more than the expected number of oesophageal, pancreatic, and lung cancers, as well as leukaemias.

Virus to blame?

The researchers, Dr Kari Hemminki, and Dr Chuanhui Dong from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, also looked at second cancers which developed in women who had previously had cervical cancer.

They found four times the expected number of anal cancer cases among these women, and more than four times the expected number of bladder cancers.

The authors hypothesised that the human papillomavirus (HPV) may be partly responsible for some of the extra cancer cases.

Scientists have already demonstrated a strong link between the virus and cervical cancer, with some groups calling for some women to be screened for the virus as a way of picking up cancers early so they can be treated.

Dr Lesley Walker, from the Cancer Research Campaign said that the double action of cigarette smoking and the virus may be at work.

She added that a link between cervical cancer and penile cancer had been suggested by cancer figures in Anglesey, Wales, where both are more common than usual.

She said: "These are very interesting results - and suggest a causitive link with HPV."

Although the rates of anal and penile cancer appear to increase in husbands of cervical cancer patients, these cancers are relatively uncommon, so the actual number of extra cases is not high.

The research was published in the journal "Epidemiology".