Participants provided a first-void urine specimen and self-collected vaginal swab for HPV molecular diagnostics.
To better measure the degree of tobacco exposure, costly biological specimens and repeated self-report measures of smoking typically are collected throughout pregnancy.
Also, laboratory measurements of glucose and lipid levels were performed on a single specimen, and relied on participants self-reporting an appropriate period of fasting, the absence of which may confound prevalence estimates and goal attainment rates.
There was very good agreement in HPV detection between clinician-collected and self- collected specimens (89.4% agreement for all types, kappa 0.59).
The self-collected specimen and one clinician-collected specimen were tested by careHPV™ and Hybrid Capture 2 (Qiagen, Gaithersburg, MD, USA); the other clinician-collected specimen was tested for HPV16/18/45 E6 protein with the OncoE6™ Cervical test (Arbor Vita Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA, USA).
Women returned a self-collected cervico-vaginal specimen and filled out a questionnaire.
For quantitative methylation-specific PCR, a new DNA isolation was performed using 5 ml of the 20 ml physician-taken specimen and the remaining material (9/10th) of the self-sampled specimen.
There were HPV testing results available for 440 (99.7%) clinician-collected specimens and 409 (92.3%) self-collected specimens.
To address these challenges, we developed an experimental setup that consists of a freestanding specimen, a self-actuation mechanism and an integrated thin film micro-heater.
Both clinician- and self-collected specimens were tested for hrHPV mRNA.
Four hundred and six women (91.6%) had HPV genotyping results for the clinician-collected and self-collected specimens.
