An orally consumable antibiotic called doxycycline can reduce sexually transmitted infections (STIs) by two-thirds in both the cases of gay sex and transgender women having unprotected sex given they take the medication within 72 hours of the intercourse, a new study found.
The findings, published in the New England Journal Of Medicine, noted that the combined incidences of gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis were cut by two-thirds in persons who were taking doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis (doxy-PEP).
“Effective methods for preventing sexually transmitted infections are badly needed,” Hugh Auchincloss, M.D., National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) told Medical Express. “This is an encouraging finding that could help reduce the number of sexually transmitted infections in populations most at-risk.”
The study also pointed toward a slight increase in anti-bacterial resistance, but further research is required to determine it.
More than 110 million incidents of sexually transmitted infections among men and women in the U.S. were reported in 2008, among which about 22 million were in young men and women aged between 15-24 years, as per estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In 2021, an estimated 2.5 million people reported syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia, up from 2.4 million cases in 2020, as per the CDC.
The latest study, led by researchers from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and the University of Washington, Seattle, involved 501 adults. All of them were assigned male sex at birth and had sex with a man in a given year. Researchers reviewed factors like HIV diagnosis or if the participants were planning to take pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medication to prevent HIV acquisition or if they had an onset of gonorrhea, chlamydia or early syphilis before. After these assessments, it was found that 327 participants were taking HIV PrEP medications and 174 of them were living with HIV.
As part of the…
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