Women at danger for chlamydia infections are far more probably to acquire tested if they will do it at home as an alternative to going to a clinic, suggests new study.

The study participants had all previously tested constructive for chlamydia and had been treated for the sexually-transmitted disease. But suggestions suggest females get tested again, 3 months after remedy, due to the fact it is simple to re-catch the infection from a companion who hasn't been treated.

"Once you have had an infection, that puts you at elevated risk for getting another infection," mentioned Charlotte Gaydos, who studies STDs and testing at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

But, she told Reuters Well being, "It's a really challenging point for clinicians, once they've treated females for an infection, to get them to come back in" for retesting.

About 1 percent on the U.S. population gets chlamydia each year, and it really is most common in young people in their teens and 20's.

Chlamydia typically doesn't have symptoms, but can bring about reproductive issues down the road in girls who don't get adequate therapy.

For the new study, Dr. Fujie Xu in the Centers for Disease Handle and Prevention and colleagues wanted to determine if they could encourage women to acquire retested for chlamydia right after a initial round of therapy by letting them do that testing at dwelling.

At household arranging and STD clinics in New Orleans, St. Louis, and Jackson, Mississippi, they randomly assigned greater than 1,000 women age 16 and older to two groups following antibiotic treatment.

One group was asked to return towards the clinic in three months for one more chlamydia test. The other was mailed a home-based "veginail swab" testing kit and told to send it back for evaluation.

All participants have been reminded about follow-up testing through phone calls from the clinics.

Girls who went to family members preparing clinics had been more most likely to do the retest than those that had their very first appointments at STD clinics. In each sorts of clinic-goers, retesting was extra common in girls who were assigned to take their second test at home.

Amongst females going to household planning clinics, 41 % assigned to take the test at dwelling did so, whilst 21 % of those asked to come back into the workplace returned for testing. At STD clinics, these numbers had been 27 % versus 19 %, once more in favor of home testing, according to findings published in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

That shows that girls "like taking their own sample, they like doing it in the privacy of their own home," stated Gaydos, who wasn't involved in the new study.

"Most folks feel fine (right after chlamydia therapy) and don't find getting tested for STDs to be a pleasant experience," stated Dr. Robert Cook, who studies STD prevention at the University of Florida in Gainesville. The take-home test "is more acceptable for the patients and less expensive -- it seems like a great strategy," he told Reuters Well being.

Cook, who also wasn't linked for the new research, stated that the take-home tests currently aren't available to ladies outside of research simply because they haven't been approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Despite that barrier, Gaydos said that using the internet to recruit young individuals to test and retest themselves for STDs at residence might also increase the chances that they will get screened, though saving them the trouble and cost of going to a doctor's appointment.

But she added that those methods only apply to people today who don't have chlamydia symptoms -- such as discharge and burning when urinating. "If you're obtaining symptoms, you need to go in and see a doctor," she stated.