Healthy men who have vaginal sex have a distinct urethral microbiome
2023-03-21
(Press-News.org) Contrary to common beliefs, your urine is not germ free. In fact, a new study shows that the urethra of healthy men is teeming with microbial life and that a specific activity—vaginal sex—can shape its composition. The research, published March 24 in the journal Cell Reports Medicine, provides a healthy baseline for clinicians and scientists to contrast between healthy and diseased states of the urethra, an entrance to the urinary and reproductive systems.
“We know where bugs in the gut come from; they primarily come from our surroundings through fecal-oral transfer,” says co-senior author David Nelson, a microbiologist at Indiana University. “But where does genital microbiology come from?”
To flush out the answer, the team of microbiologists, statisticians, and physicians sequenced the penile urethra swabs of 110 healthy adult men. These participants had no urethral symptoms or sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and no inflammation of the urethra. DNA sequencing results revealed that two types of bacterial communities call the penile urethra home—one native to the organ, the other from a foreign source.
“It is important to set this baseline,” says co-senior author Qunfeng Dong, a bioinformatician at Loyola University Chicago. “Only by understanding what health is can we define what diseases are.”
The researchers found that most of the healthy men had a simple, sparse community of oxygen-loving bacteria in the urethra. In addition, these bacteria probably live close to the urethral opening at the tip of the penis, where there is ample oxygen. The consistent findings of these bacteria suggest that they are the core community that supports penile urethra health.
But some of the men also had a more complex secondary group of bacteria that are often found in the vagina and can disturb the healthy bacterial ecosystem of the vagina. The team speculates that these bacteria reside deeper in the penile urethra because they thrive in oxygen-scarce settings. Only men who reported having vaginal sex carry these bacteria, hinting at the microbes’ origins.
Delving into the participant’s sexual history, the team found a close link between this second bacterial community and vaginal sex but not other sexual behaviors, such as oral sex and anal sex. They also found evidence that vaginal sex has lasting effects. Vagina-associated bacteria remained detectable in the participants for at least two months after vaginal sex, indicating that sexual exposure to the vagina can reshape the male urinary-tract microbiome.
“In our study, one behavior explains 10% of the overall bacterial variation,” says Nelson, when discussing the influence of vaginal sex. “The fact that a specific behavior is such a strong determinant is just profound.”
Although current findings from the study show that vaginal bacteria can spread to the penile urethra, the team’s next plan is to test whether the reverse is true. Using the newly established baseline, the researchers also hope to offer new insights into bacteria’s role in urinary- and reproductive-tract diseases, including unexplained urethral inflammation and STIs.
“STIs really impact people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged; they disproportionately impact women and minorities,” says Nelson. “It’s a part of health care that’s overlooked because of stigma. I think our study has a potential to dramatically change how we handle STI diagnosis and management in a positive way.”
###
This work was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Cell Reports Medicine, Toh et al.: “Sexual behavior shapes male genitourinary microbiome composition” https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(23)00087-3
Cell Reports Medicine (@CellRepMed) is a broad scope open-access journal from Cell Press publishing cutting-edge research in translational and clinical biomedical sciences that inform and influence human health and medicine. Visit https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/home. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
END
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2023-03-21
WASHINGTON, March 21, 2023 – 3D-printing food could address global challenges in food supply and nutrition. But there are hurdles involved in adapting additive manufacturing to produce edible materials.
In Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, University of Ottawa researchers Ezgi Pulatsu and Chibuike Udenigwe identify a range of factors that affect the print quality and shape complexity of food created with additive manufacturing. Accounting for these features can increase food quality, improve control, and speed up printing.
Additive manufacturing of food involves designing (3D shapes and their geometric codes), ...
2023-03-21
WASHINGTON, March 21, 2023 – Transportation systems in urban settings are vulnerable to a variety of factors including weather, traffic congestion, and special events. Bottlenecks, in particular, can cause major problems and lead to cascading failure of the entire system.
Scientists from Fudan University and Shanghai University of Electric Power in China developed a modeling technique to study urban traffic flows and verified it with real-world data from Shanghai. They describe their approach in Chaos, by AIP Publishing, and show that their model can be used to find previously unknown bottlenecks that could ...
2023-03-21
PHILADELPHIA—Today, The Pew Charitable Trusts announced the seven recipients of the 2023 Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation. The researchers—from Australia, Brazil, Cape Verde, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States—join a network of 202 Pew marine fellows from 42 countries.
“Pew has long supported experts whose considerable talents and solution-oriented approaches help address complex challenges in the marine environment,” said Susan K. Urahn, Pew’s president ...
2023-03-21
Philadelphia, March 21, 2023 – Researchers from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have found that adolescents who report strong relationships with their parents have better long-term health outcomes. Study findings, published today in JAMA Network Open, suggest that investments in improving parent–adolescent relationships could help improve general health, mental health and sexual, health while also reducing substance use in young adulthood.
Prior research shows that positive ...
2023-03-21
About The Study: In this study of 31 million births in the United States from 2011 to 2018, neonatal Down syndrome diagnoses increased more in states that enacted 20-week abortion bans compared with states that did not enact bans. Because these abortion bans were enacted throughout the study period and are known to inhibit choice in patient decision-making, it is possible that the difference in the rates of diagnosis is associated with these policies.
Authors: Sarina R. Chaiken, B.A., and Aaron B. Caughey, M.D., Ph.D., of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, is the corresponding author.
To ...
2023-03-21
About The Study: This study including 608,000 obstetric discharges found that Black and Hispanic patients experienced higher adjusted odds of postpartum emergency department visits across all hospital types, particularly at safety net hospitals and those disproportionately serving racial and ethnic minority populations. These findings support the urgent need to mitigate structural racism underlying maternal health disparities.
Authors: Michelle P. Lin, M.D., M.P.H., M.S., of Stanford ...
2023-03-21
About The Study: The findings of this study suggest that adolescents’ positive perceptions of their relationships with their mothers and fathers are associated with a wide range of favorable outcomes in young adulthood. Investments in improving parent-adolescent relationships may have substantial benefits for young adult population health.
Authors: Carol A. Ford, M.D., of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.3944)
Editor’s ...
2023-03-21
How does the world look like at the smallest scales? This is a question scientists are trying to answer in particle collider experiments like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. To compare the results of these experiments, theoretical physicists need to provide more and more precise predictions based on our current model for the interactions of fundamental particles, the so called standard model. A key ingredient in these predictions are so called Feynman integrals. Recently, a team of the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Mainz University, consisting of Dr. Sebastian Pögel, Dr. Xing Wang and Prof. Dr. Stefan Weinzierl developed a method to efficiently ...
2023-03-21
COLUMBIA, Mo. — For more than 20 years, Matt Maschmann, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Missouri, has worked with materials that require specialized technology — electron microscopes — to be seen by the human eye.
“When we deal with materials interacting on a nanoscale level, we can’t physically see the processes that are occurring, like the charging and discharging of a battery, for instance, without the help of an electron microscope,” Maschmann said.
Now, with the support of a two-year, $800,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and an ...
2023-03-21
Utrecht, March 21, 2023 - Recent research from University Medical Center Utrecht (UMC Utrecht) shows that our brain declines later than previously thought. Instead of after our 25th year of life, it happens when we are between the ages of 30 and 40. The researchers published their results in Nature Neuroscience.
Clinical technologist Dorien van Blooijs and neurologist Frans Leijten, together with colleagues from UMC Utrecht and the Mayo Clinic, conducted research into the processing speed of our brain and how it changes as we age.
Faster ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Healthy men who have vaginal sex have a distinct urethral microbiome
