Husband's liaisons put wife at risk.

A husband's extramarital affairs may put his wife at risk of cervical cancer, a new study finds.

Researchers had previously shown that exposure to certain types of human papillomaviruses (HPVs) heightens a woman's risk of developing cervical cancer. They also knew that HPVs are transmitted sexually. Now, Keerti V.

Shah, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, and his colleagues have explored the male role in this story of a virally induced cancer in women.

The team interviewed the husbands of women who had cervical cancer and of women who were cancerfree. The researchers asked the men about a variety of lifestyle factors, including extramarital sexual affairs. The team also conducted a test that looks for viral DNA in a sample obtained from the outside of the penis.

The researchers discovered that the presence of viral DNA on a husband's penis increased the wife's risk of cervical cancer fivefold. The study also shows that the prevalence of the viral DNA and the wife's risk of cervical cancer increase with the number of the husband's extramarital affairs. The risk is especially great when a husband has trysts with prostitutes. Indeed, wives of men who reported having seen a prostitute at least 10 times during their marriage had 11 times the risk of developing cervical cancer as the wives of men who had no contact with prostitutes.

Shah and his colleagues report their findings in the Aug. 7 Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The number of sexual partners a man reported before marriage didn't appear to influence his wife's risk of cervical cancer, Shah says. "The HPV infections do not last indefinitely," he says, adding that the body's immune system usually clears the viruses within several years.