Erythroplasia of Queyrat is a
carcinoma in situ that mainly occurs on the glans penis, the prepuce, or the urethral meatus of elderly males. Up to 30% progress to
squamous cell carcinoma. The cause of
erythroplasia of Queyrat is largely unknown. Human papillomavirus type 16
DNA has previously been detected only in very few distinctly characterized patients. We have investigated 12
paraffin-embedded biopsies from eight patients with penile
erythroplasia of Queyrat and control biopsies of inflammatory penile lesions, of genital
Bowen's disease, and of premalignant/malignant cervical or vulvar lesions by 10 different polymerase chain reaction protocols for the presence of cutaneous and genital/mucosal human papillomaviruses. Human papillomavirus typing was performed by sequencing (cloned) polymerase chain reaction products. Human papillomavirus
DNA was detected in all
erythroplasia of Queyrat patients and in none of the controls with inflammatory penile lesions. The rare cutaneous carcinogenic
epidermodysplasia verruciformis-associated human papillomavirus type 8 was present in all
erythroplasia of Queyrat patients and the genital high-risk human papillomavirus type 16 in seven of eight patients (88%). In addition to human papillomavirus type 8 and human papillomavirus type 16, four patients carried the genital carcinogenic human papillomavirus type 39 and/or type 51. All human papillomavirus type 8 sequences found in
erythroplasia of Queyrat showed some polymorphism among each other and differed in specific
nucleotide exchanges from the human papillomavirus type 8 reference sequence. Viral load determinations (human papillomavirus copies/
beta-globin gene copies) by realtime polymerase chain reactions showed that the human papillomavirus type 16 levels in the
erythroplasia of Queyrat biopsies were one to five orders of magnitude higher than the human papillomavirus type 8 levels. Human papillomavirus type 8 was not detected in cervical or vulvar precancerous and cancerous lesions and in
Bowen's disease lesions that carried genital human papillomavirus types. The data suggest that in
erythroplasia of Queyrat, in contrast to other genital
neoplasias, a
coinfection with human papillomavirus type 8 and carcinogenic genital human papillomavirus types occurs. The presence or absence of human papillomavirus type 8 might help to distinguish between penile
erythroplasia of Queyrat and Bowen's diseases.