American Journal of Epidemiology Vol. 145, No. 7: 594-597
Copyright © 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health
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Does Prior Infection with Varicella-Zoster Virus Influence Risk of Adult Glioma?
1Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Medicine, University of California San Francisco, CA
2Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Diagnostic Virology Laboratory, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center Denver, CO.
3Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, Wayne State University Detroit, MI
Reprint requests to Dr. Margaret Wrensch, Box 0560, University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco, CA 94143-0560
To evaluate a possible association between varicella-zoster virus infection and glioma, the authors asked adults with glioma (n = 462) whose tumors were diagnosed between August 1, 1991, and March 31, 1994, and age-, sex-, and ethnicity-matched controls (n = 443) about their histories of chickenpox or shingles. Cases were significantly less likely than controls to report a history of either chickenpox (odds ratio = 0.4, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.3–0.6) or shingles (odds ratio = 0.5, 95% CI 0.3–0.8). To obtain serologic support for these findings, the authors conducted double-blind enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays for immunoglobulin G antibodies to varicella-zoster virus among 167 self-reporting subjects for whom blood samples were available. Cases and controls reporting no history of chickenpox were equally likely to test positive (73% vs. 75%), but among those reporting a positive history, cases were less likely than were controls to test positive (71% vs. 85%). Despite the misclassification, an odds ratio of 0.6 was obtained using either serologic data (95% CI 0.3–1.3) or reported history of chickenpox (95% CI 0.3–1.1) in this subgroup of subjects. This suggests that adults with glioma were less likely than controls either to have had prior varicella-zoster virus infection or to have an immunoglobulin G antibody response adequate to indicate positivity. Since either explanation suggests novel mechanisms for brain tumor pathogenesis, these findings require corroboration and elaboration.
chickenpox; glioma; herpesvirus 3, human
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