High prevelance of human parvovirus infection in patients with malignant tumors

It is well known that the immunity of patients with malignant tumors decreases significantly. An increased parvovirus B19 (B19) infection rate has been observed in immunocompromised hosts. However, only a small amount of literature regarding the risk of human parvovirus infection in patients with malignant tumors is available. To evaluate the correlation of human parvovirus infection with malignant tumors, 288 serum samples from patients with malignant tumors were screened for B19 DNA by nested-PCR. The serum samples, 156 of which were from known clinicopathological cancer patients, were subjected to analysis of the seropositive rate of human bocavirus (HBoV), hepatitis B virus (HBV) and transfusion transmitted virus (TT V) by PCR. A total of 800 normal population sera and 941 aspirate samples from children with respiratory tract infections were used as controls for the detection of B19 and HBoV, respectively. Pairwise comparison between cancerous serum and control samples, and the correlation between parvovirus infection and clinicopathological variables, including gender and cancer type, were evaluated using the chi(2) test, Fisher's exact test or the t-test. P < 0.05 was considered to indicate a statistically significant difference. The overall prevalence of B19 DNA in cancer patients was 50.69% (146/288), which was significantly higher than that of the healthy controls with 4.5% (36/800) (chi(2) test, P < 0.0001). Similar results were obtained for HBoV with a 39.74% (62/156) prevalence in cancer patients. However, the infection prevalence of HBV and TTV in the cancer patients was 5.13 (8/156) and 6.41% (10/156), respectively (P < 0.0001), which was much less than that of B 19 and HBoV. These results revealed that a high risk of B19 and HBoV infection occurred in cancer patients, and a potential correlation exists between parvovirus infection and occurrence of malignant tumors.