Cervical Cancer Screening Plummets Among Young Women, Study Warns

Cervical cancer is supposed to be one of the easiest cancers to prevent. A routine screening test can catch abnormal cell changes years before they become dangerous, and the disease responds well to early treatment. Yet across the United States, fewer young women are getting screened at all. By 2023, nearly one in three women between 21 and 29 had never had a cervical cancer screening—a dramatic shift from 2005, when only about one in eight had skipped it entirely. That means roughly 6.2 million women in their 20s have never been tested, compared to 3.5 million two decades earlier.

Researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina and other institutions spent months analyzing federal health survey data spanning 2005 to 2023, tracking more than 106,000 women and cross-referencing their screening patterns against national cancer registry records. What they found was a prevention system losing its grip on younger generations. The decline accelerated around 2010 and has continued climbing ever since. The same troubling pattern appears in older women too: among those aged 30 to 65, the never-screened rate jumped from 5.3% in 2005 to 14.8% in 2023—meaning roughly one in seven women in that broader age group has never been tested. The study, published in JAMA Network Open, raises an urgent question: why is a simple, effective tool reaching fewer women just as they enter the age when screening matters most?

The disparities are sharp and revealing. Among women in their 20s, Asian women show the highest never-screened rate at 44.3%, compared with 28.8% among White women the same age. Education creates a stark divide too: 39% of women with only a high school diploma have never been screened, versus 17.1% of those with a master's or doctoral degree. In the older age group, uninsured women face significantly higher barriers than those with private insurance, and women living in the South and Northeast have higher never-screened rates than those in the West. These gaps overlap almost perfectly with the populations already struggling most to access health care.

There is one bright spot in the data. HPV vaccination rates among the youngest women climbed from 5.7% in 2008 to 54% by 2019, a substantial gain. But that progress masks a troubling reality: nearly 8 million unvaccinated women aged 21 to 29 remain at risk, and almost a third of them have also never been screened. The vaccine and the screening test work together—missing both leaves women doubly exposed.

The consequences are already visible in cancer diagnoses. Among women aged 30 to 64, cases where cervical cancer had already spread beyond the cervix increased by more than 2% per year starting in 2017. Among women 65 and older, advanced cases have been climbing since 2001. The researchers were careful not to claim the screening gaps directly caused the rise in advanced diagnoses, but the timing and the overlap are difficult to ignore. Late-stage cervical cancer and deaths from the disease are already known to be higher among minority groups, uninsured women, and those in Southern states—the same populations showing the lowest screening rates in this new analysis.

What makes this pattern especially troubling is that cervical cancer screening is neither complicated nor expensive. A test takes minutes. It works. The barrier is not the tool itself but getting it to the women who need it most. The data shows that younger women, particularly those with less education and fewer economic resources, are falling through the cracks of a prevention system that should be catching them. As advanced cases climb among older women, the question becomes whether today's unscreened young women will face the same fate in the years ahead.