Resource Pack: Cervical Cancer Models

This resource pack, curated by the Center for Health Decision Science, is a collection of models of HPV-related cervical cancer, differing in design, structure and features based on analytic objectives.

In many ways, HPV and its related diseases represent a prototypical public health problem given the communicable and non-communicable nature of disease, opportunities for intervention along the entire disease spectrum (e.g., primary and secondary prevention, diagnosis, treatment), the varied ages at which interventions are targeted (e.g., adolescence, adulthood), the sharing of a single etiological agent across multiple health conditions, the differential burden of HPV across populations, and the staggering health disparities worldwide.

No clinical trial or single longitudinal cohort study would be able to consider all of these factors; in fact, just predicting the population-level impact of cervical cancer prevention is challenging as the time course from infection to disease spans several decades and most data are based on intermediate endpoints. As a result, mathematical models have played a critical role in synthesizing evidence and data, predicting the expected values of competing health decisions or strategies, and exploring the uncertainty that is inherent in every decision.

In the HPV-related cancer arena, models have been developed in the context of different research objectives, ranging from projecting type-specific HPV prevalence patterns with vaccination to evaluating the comparative effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of screening and vaccination; accordingly, the models have differed in their design and structure, accommodation of transmission dynamics, inclusion of multiple HPV types, and use of empirical calibration.