“Jersey Shore” star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi announced Friday that she had been diagnosed with cervical cancer.
The 38-year-old reality star revealed in a TikTok video that her results at a post-op appointment for a cone biopsy — a procedure that removes a cone-shaped piece of cervical tissue to check for precancerous cells — showed a stage 1 cervical cancer called adenocarcinoma.
“Obviously not the news that I was hoping for, but also not the worst news just because they caught it so early. Thank freaking God!” Polizzi said in the nearly eight-minute video.
Prior to her diagnosis, Polizzi said she was “struggling with abnormal pap smears for three or four years now.”
“That’s why I’m literally telling you guys to get your pap smears done. I’m 38 years old … and now look at me,” she said. “And instead of just putting it off because I didn’t want to go and it hurt and I was scared, no, I just went and did it. And it was there, cancer is in there. But it’s only stage 1 and it’s curable.”
Polizzi had first mentioned needing a colposcopy and biopsy in a TikTok in January.
Nicole Polizzi attends the MTV Video Music Awards at UBS Arena on Sept. 7, 2025, in Elmont, New York. / Credit: Taylor Hill/ WireImage / Getty Images
(Taylor Hill/ WireImage / Getty Images)
Polizzi said she has a PET scan scheduled next to determine whether or not there is cancer elsewhere in her body.
“A lot of women go through it silently without anyone to talk to and they’re scared by themselves. And that was me until I decided to upload the video about what was happening with me,” she said.
Polizzi gained popularity when “Jersey Shore” premiered on MTV in 2009. The hit show ran until 2012. She later starred in a spin-off called “Snooki & JWoww,” which ran from 2012 to 2015.
According to the American Cancer Society, a little more than 13,000 cervical cancer cases are diagnosed in the U.S. each year. Since the mid-1970s, the death rate from cervical cancer has dropped by more than half due to screening and prevention, the ACS says. The human papillomavirus, HPV, is the primary cause of cervical cancer. A 2021 U.K. study found that the risk of developing cervical cancer dropped significantly for those with HPV vaccines.
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