Research: Oral Sex Puts Men at Risk for Oral Cancer

Rates of oral cancer are on the rise among men, and researchers say the culprit isn't the devil you might think.

The rising rates of oral cancer aren't being caused by tobacco, experts say, but by HPV, the same sexually transmitted virus responsible for the vast majority of cases of cervical cancer in women.

Millions of women and girls have been vaccinated against HPV, or human papillomavirus, but doctors now say men exposed to the STD during oral sex are at risk as well and may have higher chances of developing oral cancer.

An oral cancer screening is given at a free dental clinic in Brighton, Colo. The incidence of the disease is increasing among men who are exposed to the sexually transmitted virus HPV during oral sex.

About 65 percent of oral cancer tumors were linked to HPV in 2007, according to the National Cancer Institute. And the uptick isn't occurring among tobacco smokers.

"We're looking at non-smokers who are predominantly white, upper middle class, college-educated men," Brian Hill, the executive director of the Oral Cancer Foundation, told AOL News by phone.

Tobacco use has declined over the past decade, but rates of HPV infections have risen and affect at least 50 percent of the sexually active American population, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

HPV-16, the strain of the virus that causes cervical cancer in women, has become the leading cause of oral cancer in non-smoking men, Hill said, citing research in the New England Journal of Medicine.

"When the No. 1 cause of your disease goes down [tobacco use], you would expect that the incidence of disease would go down, but that hasn't happened," he said. "In our world, this is an epidemic."

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