This is an awkward study poorly described in the journal paper. They are studying two groups, one that is CIN+ and HPV+ and the other that is CIN- but HPV+. The

This is an awkward study poorly described in the journal paper. They are studying two groups, one that is CIN+ and HPV+ and the other that is CIN- but HPV+. They are applying the same treatment. It's essentially two studies. They provide no treatment control groups but seem to rely on control statistics from a previous, similar study, and only mention it in passing in the discussion. The control that should be covered is for CIN that naturally regresses, which is clearly a significant case as they exclude women under 25 because they "easily regress." They note that their final regression rate with treatment is the same as previously reported natural regression after two years (57% vs. 58%), but indicate their rate of regression to that point is faster (6 vs. 24 months), but not statistically significantly so - they only had 12 CIN+ HPV+ subjects. They also seem to rely on, but make no mention of, natural HPV viral clearance by the immune system. They similarly indicate that the treatment group's clearance rate of HPV is similar to previously reported, but un-cited, rates of natural clearance, but with a sharper slope to the clearance rate among the treated patients. They offer that this might be due to coincidentally specific immune response to the treatment that corresponds to the necessary immune response for effective natural HPV clearance. In many respects, this is a report of negative results, and they don't really hide that. They just wait until the discussion to explicitly mention any of the key information. But respect for publishing negative results. EDIT: changed "article" to "journal paper" to avoid confusing the published research paper with the news report of it that was originally linked and which I didn't bother wasting time reading.