OBJECTIVETo study the relationship between human papillomavirus (HPV) and esophageal cancer development in China.

METHODSWe searched and collected the published articles in Chinese related to HPV and esophageal cancer, and selected the articles with the PCR approach to detect HPV in the esophageal cancer specimens.

RESULTSWe filtered our publication collection with standards as (1) PCR as the detection approach, (2) specimens as the paraffin-embedded sections, and (3) description of the primer in the experiments, and fifteen articles were enrolled for our meta-analysis. Among the articles, totally 980 specimens were tested, and 460 were HPV positive with the average HPV prevalence was 46.9% (95% CI: 43.8%-50.0%), varied from 8.3%-69.8% in the different locations. On the other hands, among 556 specimens whose HPV detection spectrum included HPV16, 139 showed the positivity of HPV16, the average prevalence was 25.0%, (95% CI: 21.4%-28.6%) varied from 4.4%-63.4% dependent on the locations; among 485 specimens whose HPV detection spectrum included HPV18, thirty-three specimens showed the positivity of HPV18, the average prevalence was 6.8% (95% CI: 4.6%-9.0%) varied from 0%-19.0% dependent on the locations. Third, among the fifteen articles enrolled in the meta-analysis, four articles used the same primer set for HPV detection in totally 406 paraffin-embedded specimens with the prevalence of 40.2% (95% CI: 36.0%-45.4%) varied from 20.3%-67.6% in different locations.

CONCLUSIONOur analysis result suggested the HPV prevalence in the esophageal cancer samples of China and clued the possible etiological relationships between HPV infection and the esophageal cancer development.