Abstract: Cervical cancer is one of the commonest cancer cause of death among women worldwide. >80% of all the cervical cancer cases are found in developing and low-resource countries, because of a lack of awareness and difficulty in running cytology-based screening programs. Conventional Pap smear testing has been the mainstay of most of the screening programs. Cervical cytology screening by Pap smear has been proven to decrease the incidence and mortality of cervical cancer.
Material and Methods: This study was conducted in the department of Gynecological Oncology, State Cancer Institute at Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Patna, Bihar. 876 women above 20 years of age were enrolled in this study and they were screened for cervical cancer by taking Pap smear. The smears were studied in detail and were interpreted as per the new Bethesda System for Reporting Cervical Cytology 2014.
Results: In this study, most of the women belonged to 41 to 50 years of age group. White discharge per vagina is the chief complain. 69.59% women were negative for intraepithelial lesions or malignancy. Inflammatory smear were found in 10.76% women. Epithelial cell abnormalities reported on cervical cytology were ASCUS in 1.86%, LSIL in 0.13%, HSIL in 2.52%, ASC-H in 0.13%, Squamous cell carcinoma in 6.51% and Adenocarcinoma in 0.53%.
Conclusion: Pap smear based cervical cytology is a simple, safe, and cost-benefit test to detect premalignant and malignant cervical lesions at an early stage. Pap smear should be encouraged as a screening method in developing countries like INDIA due to its low cost and effectiveness in detecting cervical lesions, especially high-grade.
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