Meta‐analysis of agreement/concordance statistics in studies comparing self‐ vs clinician‐collected samples for HPV testing in cervical cancer screening

Abstract We conducted a meta‐analysis of test agreement/concordance between human papillomavirus (HPV) testing in self‐collected vs clinician‐collected samples in 26 studies (10 071 participants) updating a previous meta‐analysis on accuracy for cervical precancer. Pooled overall agreement was 88.7% (95% CI: 86.3%‐90.9%), positive agreement was 84.6% (95% CI: 79.9%‐88.7%), negative agreement was 91.7% (95% CI: 89.1%‐94.0%) and kappa was 0.72 (95% CI: 0.66‐0.78). Subgroup meta‐analyses suggested higher overall agreement for target amplification‐based DNA assays (90.4%) compared to signal amplification‐based DNA assays (86.7%; P = .175) or RNA assays (82.3%; P < .001). HPV test agreement/concordance targets may provide criteria to extend existing validations toward alternative sampling approaches and devices/storage media.