Cervical Health and Screening

Candace Cooley has performed colposcopy and the loop electrosurgical excision procedure, the office treatments that follow an abnormal cervical screening result, and this index gathers the entries on the cervix and its screening. Both of the classic tools are about a century old. In Hamburg, Hans Hinselmann first used the colposcope in December 1924, mounting a magnifying microscope and a strong light on a stand so that doctors could see cervical tumors while they were still small; by the twenty first century colposcopy had become the follow up to an abnormal Pap test.¹

The Pap test itself came from a long study of cells. George Papanicolaou first published his finding on cancer cells in vaginal smears in 1928, when it went largely unnoticed, and set it out in full in a book written with the gynecologic pathologist Herbert Traut in 1943.² The cause of the disease was identified later. The National Cancer Institute states that virtually all cervical cancer is caused by HPV, that most infections are cleared by the immune system within a year or two, and that a high risk infection persisting for many years can lead to cell changes that become precancerous and then cancerous.³

The six entries are HPV and Cervical Cancer, The HPV Vaccine, Colposcopy and the LEEP Procedure, George Papanicolaou and the Pap Test, How Cervical Screening Guidelines Changed and Self Collected HPV Testing.