Prevalence of cytologic lesions in IMSS beneficiaries, 2018-2022

Abstract

Cervical cytology or Papanicolaou (PAP), which studies the exfoliated cells of the cervix, has revolutionized public health worldwide by reducing the incidence and mortality from cervical cancer (CaCu). In Mexico, the incidence ranks fifth with 13.2 per 100,000 women, and the 5-year prevalence is 49.8 per 100,000 women. However, the precise prevalence is unknown. The aim of the present study was to describe the prevalence of cervical lesions in female beneficiaries of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), by age group and region of the country. A secondary analysis of data, captured from 2018 to 2022, from the CaCu module of the IMSS Institutional Cancer Registry (RIC) was performed from 3,581,098 unique cytology records of women aged 25 to 95 years. The prevalent result was negative for lesion (97.5%), the rest were suspicious for cervical lesions (2.5%), of which low grade lesions were the most prevalent. The descriptive analysis showed that 27.77% were records of women aged 45 to 54 years. The 32.59% of the records correspond to the center of the country. Regarding cytological results by year, the lowest prevalence was reported in 2018 (4.68%), while the highest corresponded to 2022 (34.42%). These data allowed determining that premalignant lesions are prevalent in IMSS during 2018-2022, compared to the other cytological results.