According to a new research, Women who smoke and also carry high levels of the virus associated with cervical cancer are up to 27 times more likely to develop the most common form of cervical cancer compared with uninfected women who also smoke.

Smoking and the human papilloma virus (HPV) have been linked to cervical cancer before. But the new study is the first to look at a possible interplay between heavy smoking and virus levels, said study author Anthony Gunnell, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

“The risk for developing pre-malignant cervical cancer increases as HPV load increases,” Gunnell said. “Importantly though, it increases more with increasing HPV (levels) if you smoke than if you don’t.”

In the new study, Gunnell and colleagues looked at the medical records of 738 women, including 375 with signs of precancerous cervical lesions and 363 healthy women. The researchers found the subjects by looking through a database of 146,104 women who underwent cervical screening in a region of Sweden between 1969 and 1995.

The American Cancer Society estimates that about 9,710 cases of cervical cancer will be diagnosed in the United States this year, and 3,700 will die.

However, the number of deaths dropped by 74 percent between 1955 and 1992, mostly because of the growing popularity of Pap tests that detect possible signs of cancer. Now, there is a vaccine available to prevent HPV infection and most cases of cervical cancer.

Scientists think a huge number of cervical cancer cases are caused by HPV, which may be the most common sexually transmitted disease. HPV seems to boost the risk of cancer by causing inflammation.

The research was supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the Swedish Cancer Society and the Danish National Research Foundation.

Government public health authorities in the United States have only recently begun recommending a vaccine against HPV for adolescent girls and young women in an effort to protect them from cervical cancer in the future.

Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths worldwide, and death rates are particularly high in developing countries.

The findings are published in the November issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

“Our study would imply a synergistic action between HPV and smoking that would greatly increase the likelihood of women developing cervical cancer if they are HPV-positive smokers,” said Anthony Gunnell, a medical biostatistician at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the report published Friday in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.