MedWire News: Women with ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease are more likely to have abnormal smear test results than women without these inflammatory bowel diseases, research shows.

The small study of 40 patients with inflammatory bowel disease indicates that abnormal smear tests are even more likely in inflammatory bowel disease patients treated with immunosuppressants, the team reports in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Suppression of the immune system is known to raise the risk of cancer in certain cases, including patients with HIV and transplant patients, but previous studies have not looked at the situation in patients with inflammatory bowel disease.

In the current trial, Dr Sunanda Kane (Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA) and co-workers compared the smear test results of eight patients with ulcerative colitis and 32 patients with Crohn's disease with those of 120 women free of inflammatory bowel disease.

The researchers found that more than four in 10 women with inflammatory bowel disease had had an abnormal Pap smear result at some point in their lives, and that they were more than four times as likely to do so as women without inflammatory bowel disease.

Low-grade cervical abnormalities were about twice as common and high-grade abnormalities about three times as common in inflammatory bowel disease patients as in individuals without the condition, the team reports in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Further analysis showed that inflammatory bowel diease patients were 50% more likely to have an abnormal smear test result if they had used an immunomodulator.

Kane and team suggest that patients with inflammatory bowel disease should be given more frequent smear tests.

They add: "Women with IBD on immunosuppressants... regardless of sexual activity history, should be considered candidates for the [cervical cancer] vaccine."