Clinical performance of Abbott RealTime High Risk HPV test for detection of high-grade cervical intraepithelial neoplasia in women with abnormal cytology.

BACKGROUND: Abbott RealTime High Risk (HR) HPV is a recently developed test for the detection of 14 high-risk oncogenic HPV types combined with the ability to concurrently identify genotypes 16 and 18.

OBJECTIVES: The clinical performance of the Abbott RealTime HR HPV test was evaluated in comparison with the Hybrid Capture 2 (HC2) test for the detection of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia 2 or worse (CIN2+). The relative accuracy of the Abbott RealTime HR HPV to detect high-risk HPV was also determined.

STUDY DESIGN: Cervical specimens were collected from 702 patients with abnormal cytology who were referred for colposcopy, and were tested with liquid based cytology (LBC), Abbott RealTime HR HPV and HC2. Genotyping was done using the Linear Array (LA) method. Histological assessment was used as the gold standard for disease status. Clinical performance for detection of disease was evaluated for Abbott RealTime HR HPV in comparison with HC2 in the overall population and in each cytological grade. The relative accuracy for detection of high-risk HPV was assessed by concordance between the two tests and based on LA genotyping.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The Abbott RealTime HR HPV showed similar clinical performance for detection of CIN2+ when compared with HC2, for both the overall population and those with a cytological grade of atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance (ASC-US). The accuracy for detection of high-risk HPV was significantly higher with Abbott RealTime HR HPV than with HC2.