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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Public Health
Sec. Infectious Diseases: Epidemiology and Prevention
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1486356

Epidemiology of vaginitis Frontiers in Microbiology Public Health -RevisionsV (3)

Provisionally accepted
Deirdre Church Deirdre Church 1*Christopher Naugler Christopher Naugler 1Maggie Guo Maggie Guo 2Ranjani Somayaji Ranjani Somayaji 1
  • 1 University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
  • 2 Alberta Health Services, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Bacterial vaginosis (BV), vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC), and Trichomonas vaginalis (TV) commonly cause infectious vaginitis in women, especially those of reproductive age.Characterization of the epidemiology of infectious vaginitis in a contemporary population-based cohort was done to determine the longitudinal age-standardized and sex-based testing, positivity, and incidence rates and ratios of infectious vaginitis in a large Canadian healthcare region. We conducted a population-based cohort study from March 2015 through March 2018 using the Alberta Precision Laboratories (APL) microbiology database. Calgary 2016 census data was used to calculate incidence rates (IR) and ratios (IRR) for cases and testing rates. For testing and positivity, female sex, and younger age groups were associated with increased risk of BV, VVC and TV infections. The annual mean population in 2016 was 1,411,660 individuals (50.3% female). A total of 40,259 cases/293,853 tests (13.7%) of BV, 32,894 cases/293,853 tests (11.2%) of VVC, and 2018 cases/342,.9086 tests (0.7%) of TV were in femalesidentified. The overall IR for BV ranged from 0 to 609 cases per 10,000 person-years. The overall IR for VVC ranged from 0 to 445 per 10,000 person-years. The overall IR for TV ranged from 0 to 27 per 10,000 person-years. The highest age-specific testing positivity rate and IR rate for BV and VVC occurred in women aged 20-34 yrs., and 20-34 yrs. For TV. Female IR for BV, VVC and TV remained stable during the study. These unique regional data provide insight for the development of appropriate age-specific clinical testing criteria according to relative risk of acquisition of each vaginitis agent.

    Keywords: Vaginitis, Epidemiology, population-based, bacterial vaginosis, trichomoniasis, vulvovaginal candidiasis

    Received: 03 Sep 2024; Accepted: 16 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Church, Naugler, Guo and Somayaji. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Deirdre Church, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.