Researchers have discovered that women who have a large amount of sexual partners are less likely to be diagnosed with throat and mouth cancer.
Daily Mail reports that scientists at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting said that they also discovered that men are twice as likely to contract the illness.
Throat and mouth cancer is linked to the human papillomarvirus (HPV) which is a sexually transmitted infection.
For men, the risk of HPV-caused cancer increases with the number of oral sex partners that they have, whereas with women, their number of sexual partners does not increase their risk.
“Comparing men and women with the same number of sexual partners, a man is much more likely to become infected with oral HPV than a woman. Furthermore, women who have a greater number of vaginal sex partners appear to face a lower risk of oral HPV infection,” Gypsyamber D'Souza, who teaches epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, said.
Research published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) revealed that oral sex might increase the risk of head and neck cancer by 22 percent.
Oral cancer has risen 225 percent in the last 20 years
