Comparison of DRY and WET vaginal swabs with cervical specimens in Roche Cobas 4800 HPV and Abbott RealTime High Risk HPV tests.

Background: Self-collected vaginal swab samples have been proposed as an alternative specimen collection method for human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA detection.

Objectives: Two vaginal swabs (a cone-shaped flocked swab (DRY) and a L-shape FLOQSwab with 2mL eNAT transport medium (WET)) were compared to standard cervical samples for HPV DNA testing. Additionally, they were also compared by using Roche Cobas 4800 HPV (Roche_HPV) and Abbott Real-time High Risk HPV (Abbott_HPV) tests.

Study Design: Ninety-six women were prospectively enrolled from the National Cancer Center in Korea between June and August 2015. WET and DRY vaginal swabs and cervical specimens were collected. Roche_HPV and Abbott_HPV tests were performed. The Roche_HPV test on cervical specimens was used as reference.

Results: The observed agreements (kappa) of Roche_HPV and Abbott_HPV between WET and DRY swabs were 89.6% (0.790, 95% confidence interval (95% CI): 0.667-0.913) and 91.7% (0.833, 95%CI: 0.723-0.943), respectively. No statistical difference was observed between WET and DRY swabs (p>0.05 for all comparisons). For HPV16/18, the sensitivity/specificity of Roche_HPV on the DRY and WET samples presented 93.8%/96.3% and 87.5%/97.5%, respectively. For other High Risk HPV (hrHPV), the sensitivity/specificity of Roche_HPV on the DRY and WET swabs presented 91.9%/91.5% and 97.3%/98.3, respectively. The sensitivity/specificity of the Abbott_HPV on the DRY and WET swabs were 93.8%/98.8%, 87.5%/98.8% for HPV16/18, and 91.9%/93.2%, 100.0%/93.2% for other hrHPV, respectively.

Conclusions: HPV tests performed similarly when using vaginal DRY and WET swab samples. Using DRY and WET swabs to collect vaginal specimens could be an alternative to collecting cervical samples for HPV DNA testing.