Genetic features of Mexican women predisposing to cancer of the uterine cervix

Cervical carcinoma is the most common neoplasia in Mexican women. Previous studies report association of this neoplasia with the major histocompatibil ity complex (MHC) antigens in Caucasians. In the present study, we compared antigen frequencies of class I and class II MHC phenotypes in patients and ethnically matched healthy controls. Patients had significantly increased frequencies of HLA-A2 (PC = .000003) and HLA-DR5 (PC = .01) as compared wit h healthy controls. Conversely, we found a significant decrease of HLA-DR6 (PC = .01), HLA-DR2 (PC = .0005) and HLA-DR1 (PC = .0009) as compared with healthy controls. These results confirm some previous studies on HLA-associ ations with cervical carcinoma and reinforce the theory of independent mech anisms of MHC class I and class LI genes in the etiopathogenesis of this di sease. Copyright (C) 1999 by W.B. Saunders Company.