A trial with a new approach to treating bacterial vaginosis (BV), a condition that affects millions of people across the globe, has suggested that treating both affected females and their male partners with antibiotics can significantly reduce the risk of their symptoms returning.
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Estimated to affect between 23 to 29 percent of women of reproductive age, BV is a condition involving the bacteria in the vagina. Normally, there’s a balance of “good” and “harmful” bacteria, but in BV, this balance is thrown off, with an overgrowth of the harmful bacteria.
Some people won’t experience any symptoms as a result of this, but it can lead to off-white or gray discharge that has a fishy smell, vaginal irritation, and a burning feeling when peeing.
Typically, people with BV are treated with antibiotics, but that’s far from a cure; it’s common for BV to come back, with one study finding that over 50 percent of women experienced a recurrence within 12 months.
One of the risk factors for the return of symptoms is having sex with a regular partner. Based on that, researchers from the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre have been trialing a different approach to treating BV – giving the usual treatment of antibiotics to affected females while simultaneously treating their male partners with both antibiotic pills and a cream.
The trial involved 164 monogamous male-female couples, split into two groups: one in which both partners received antibiotics for a week, and a control group where only the female partner was given antibiotic treatment for a week. After the week was over, all were followed up over the next 12 weeks to check if symptoms had returned.
The results of the treatment were so clear from that 3-month period that the trial actually ended up finishing earlier than originally planned; when partners were treated simultaneously, the risk of BV returning was around half that of the control group.
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“This successful intervention is relatively cheap and short and has the potential for the first time to not only improve BV cure for women, but opens up exciting new opportunities for BV prevention, and prevention of the serious complications associated with BV,” said study author Professor Catriona Bradshaw in a statement.
The results also provide evidence that BV can indeed be sexually transmitted. Previous research that included treating men had suggested otherwise, explained Bradshaw, but the researcher said that “these studies had design limitations, and none used a combination of oral and topical antibiotics to adequately clear BV bacteria in men, especially from the penile-skin site.”
“Our trial has shown that reinfection from partners is causing a lot of the BV recurrence women experience, and provides evidence that BV is in fact an STI.”
The study is published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Source Link: Men Could Be The “Missing Link” To Treating Bacterial Vaginosis
