Ashish Deshmukh of the Medical University of South Carolina and colleagues analyzed cervical cancer mortality in women under 25 in the United States from 1992 to 2021 and concluded that it began to decline rapidly after the introduction of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines. Their paper appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The first HPV vaccine was approved for routine use in the United States in 2006. Initially, these vaccines were available only to adolescent girls, but their indications gradually expanded to include women up to 45 years of age.
The researchers found that over the last 10 years examined, mortality declined by 62 percent. Between 2012 and 2019, it decreased by 12 percent annually, reaching a cumulative rate of 65 percent. In the 1990s, 50–60 American women under 25 died of cervical cancer every three years; in 2019–2021, there were 13 such cases. The authors note that the progressive decline in mortality began after the introduction of HPV vaccines and there are no other factors to which it could be attributed. However, currently, only about 60 percent of girls aged 13–15 in the United States have received the recommended doses of the vaccine.
