The advantages of using menstrual cups go far beyond facilitating access to education, according to a recent study conducted in Kenya by researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago. The study discovered that teenage girls who received menstrual cups had a healthier vaginal flora and were less likely to get specific vaginal infections. The results have been released in PLOS Medicine.
The National Institutes of Health-funded study 436 secondary school girls from Kenya, half of whom received menstruation cups. They underwent tests for bacterial vaginosis, a typical kind of infection, every six months, as well as tests for STIs at 12 months and 30 months. To ascertain the relative frequency of advantageous and detrimental bacteria, the researchers also examined the vaginal microbiomes of the subjects.
At the conclusion of the trial, the girls who received menstrual cups had a 37% higher likelihood of having a healthy vaginal microbiota and a 26% lower likelihood of having bacterial vaginosis than the girls who did not.
Overall, menstrual cups did not seem to reduce the incidence of STIs, but after controlling for confounding variables including age and the girls’ sexual activity, the researchers did observe a reduction in STIs among those who used menstrual cups.
The study’s primary investigator, Supriya Mehta, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the School of Public Health at UIC, said, “The results showed that menstrual cups could be a game-changer in helping to keep girls healthy.”
Supriya and colleagues discovered that menstrual cup users had a 37% greater prevalence of the Lactobacillus crispatus bacterium in their vaginal microbiota. This bacterium is linked to healthy vaginal function and is diminished by dysbiosis, an imbalance in the microbiome linked to disease. Because menstrual cups remove blood from the vaginal vault, the researchers contend that they are better for the vaginal microbiome than other products. Contrarily, tampons don’t, thus the vaginal vault turns into an iron-rich environment that is a welcoming habitat for germs that can lead to infections.
