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Home › Articles › Illnesses, Diseases & Disorders › Human Papillomavirus

Human Papillomavirus

Can HPV Affect Your Fertility, Pregnancy or Baby?

By Teri Brown

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

According to Dr. Fink, the presence of HPV or pre-cancers affects neither being pregnant nor, usually, the process of labor and delivery. The only caveat is that occasionally a pregnant woman has such large growth of genital warts on the vaginal skin and vulva that vaginal delivery is not possible. This is an extremely rare occurrence.

Can Baby Contract HPV?
"Yes, but the incidence is rare," Dr. Fink says. "A condition called juvenile respiratory papillomatosis (JRP) is the most common form of benign growth of the larynx and windpipe in children, usually occurring between ages 2 and 5. It occurs due to exposure to HPV from Mom. Risk factors are known to be first-born child, vaginal delivery and a teenage mom with genital warts. One study showed babies born to moms with genital warts [are] 231 times more likely to have JRP than those born without this history."

Still, JRP is rare. The risk to babies born even with this history is less than 1 percent, according to Dr. Fink. Therefore, there is no recommendation that moms with HPV have C-section deliveries. HPV is so common that if a C-section were performed on every woman with a history of HPV, thousands of unnecessary C-sections would be performed to avoid a single case of JRP.

Having a Healthy Pregnancy with HPV
Dr. Michael Randell, an OB/GYN at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, Ga., says the most important thing a woman with HPV can do to have a healthy pregnancy is to have a pap smear during her first visit. "If there is diagnosis of an abnormality, pregnant women are treated a little different," he says. "Patients will still get colposcopies, but we are not likely to do a biopsy unless we consider it really being a high-grade lesion or cancer. Our job during pregnancy is just to make sure a patient doesn't have cancer. Doing biopsies is not without risk, including preterm delivery and miscarriage, so we try to just look at the cervix. Many times, we'll look each trimester to make sure everything is fine."

The good news is that many patients who have pre-cancers during pregnancy and have vaginal delivery may have a regression of the disease from the cells sloughing off at the time of delivery. This data was presented in Orlando at the Society of Gynecologic Oncology in the late '90s.


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