OBJECTIVETo study the distribution of human papillomavirus type 16 (HPV16) variants and their clinical significance in Han women with Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia (CIN).

METHODSRandomly making a collection of DNA samples of cervical cells from 77 Han out-patients infected with HPV16, PCR amplification of HPV16 DNA fragments containing E6 and E7 genes and sequenced. To study the HPV16 variants types in these out-patients and explore the relationship between the HPV16 variants and CIN by comparing the E6 genes sequenced with the reference strains downloaded from the GenBank. RESULTS Among 77 patients, the minimum age is 21 years old, the maximum age is 56 years old, and the average age is 36.39 +/- 6.86 years old. 61 patients (accounting for 79.2%) were diagnosed as CIN II and higher grade lesions while 16 patients (accounting for 20.8%) as CIN I. In this research, only European variant and Asian variant were found by Parsimony analyses of the sequences. There are 38 Asian variants and 39 European variants. With Chi2 test, Chi2 = 0.0034, P = 0.9535 > 0.05, it suggested that there was no enough evidence to support Asian- and European-variants had the different risk in the cause of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia and cervical cancer.

CONCLUSIONIt was not found Asian- and European-variants of HPV16 had different effect on the cervical cancer, but found only two major variants-Asian- and European-variants in Han people in this research. So we have reason to speculate that there are two major HPV16 variants (Asian- and European-variants) in China's Han women, while other variants, especially high cancer-causing Asian/American variant are not common.