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Comment by ejstronge | Hacker News Reader

> Spontaneous mutations? Which no matter how much you carve out modifiable risk factors will always be a thing. At least 5% of cervical cancers are HPV negative

Random mutations causing cervical cancer essentially does not happen - as a sibling commenter writes, well-studied cases of this are so rare that they’re below our sensitivity of detection/technical error rates.

This is what I mean when I say we try to apply our intuitions to medicine - they’re not reliable and the truth is idiosyncratic.

Because our prior for cervical cancer being caused by HPV is so incredibly high, we would require overwhelming evidence to reject the hypothesis that any new case is due to HPV. There are ways to do this, and, should they be attained, would be published in a reputable journal based on their novelty.

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> as a sibling commenter writes, well-studied cases of this are so rare that

And yet not a single cite in sight. A random commenter on orange site is not evidence

However I know the paper they are referring to - it is from 1999 in J Pathology, famous at the time, and it is woefully out of date.

> they’re below our sensitivity of detection/technical error rates.

Hogwash.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0817/14/7/668

> There are ways to do this, and, should they be attained, would be published in a reputable journal based on their novelty.

There are plenty of papers on HPV independent cervical cancer based on actual gene expression methods published in reputable journals in the last 30 years.

> > as a sibling commenter writes, well-studied cases of this are so rare that

> And yet not a single cite in sight. A random commenter on orange site is not evidence

At a certain point, one has to take on the obligation of self-education.

> Hogwash.

From the website link you pasted: "Test-Specific Technical Issues - Standard tests (such as PCR or in situ hybridization) may not detect HPV types not included in the test panel (rare or classic non-oncogenic variants)."

> There are plenty of papers on HPV independent cervical cancer based on actual gene expression methods published in reputable journals in the last 30 years.

You don't understand the field, so you don't know why the gene expression does not establish the presence or absence of HPV but instead can be used as an argument for the absence of HPV.

EDIT: Also, a fundamental point of misunderstanding - cervical cancer is not a 'new' disorder, so unless you have an explanation for why the 1999 article is wrong, we can't simply discard its result and favor a next-generation sequencing article.

Well to bring this back to the original question: "What are these other ways?", how does GCA not qualify?

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