Abstract
BACKGROUND: Two transport media, PreservCyt and SurePath, are widely used for cervical cytology screening. There are concerns that they may perform differently for HPV testing. OBJECTIVES: A comparison of the performance of six different HPV tests in SurePath and PreservCyt in a referral population using two samples from each woman. The primary goal was to compare the performance of each test in the two media. Comparisons between assays and viral load comparisons between media were secondary aims. STUDY DESIGN: Two cervical samples were collected in random order at the same visit in women with abnormal cytology. One sample was placed in 20ml of PreservCyt and the other in 10ml of SurePath. Aliquots were taken for 4 DNA based tests: digene HC2 High-Risk HPV DNA Test, Abbott Realtime, BD Onclarity and Genera PapType, an RNA based test-: Hologic Aptima and a protein test: OncoHealth. RESULTS: 630 sample pairs were included in the analyses. For all tests except the protein test sensitivities were in excess of 90% for CIN2+ and 95% for CIN3+ for both media and with no significant differences except for a lower sensitivity for CIN2+ of Aptima in SurePath (93% vs 98%, P=0.005). Specificity for