Women lose more quality-adjusted life-years than men because of STDs
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Estimates of lifetime quality-adjusted life-years lost due to gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis were substantially higher among women than among men in 2018, researchers found.
“STDs contribute to a number of adverse health outcomes. Yet we do not have good estimates of the total health burden caused by STDs,” Yunfei Li, doctoral student in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Healio.
“These STDs [gonorrhea, chlamydia, and trichomoniasis] contribute to similar reproductive health consequences,” Li said.
Li and colleagues quantified the [quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs)] lost attributable to chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis in the U.S. by sex and age group by adapting a probability-tree mode and using it to conduct a multivariate sensitivity analyses.
Through this analysis, they found that the estimated total discounted lifetime QALYs lost due to infections in 2018 were highest for chlamydia (1,541 QALYs lost among men and 111,872 QALYs lost among women), followed by gonorrhea (989 QALYs lost among men and 12,112 among women) and lowest for trichomoniasis (386 among men and 4,576 among women).
Li elaborated further that QALYs lost per incident infection were “substantially higher” in women than in men for all the three infections and across all age groups. She added that QALYs lost per incident infection were highest among women who acquired chlamydia.
The study showed that among women, the average number of lifetime QALYs lost per incident infection was 3.3-fold higher for chlamydia than for gonorrhea, and 34.8-fold higher for chlamydia than for trichomoniasis. According to Li, this is a because there are more “reproductive health outcomes” associated with these infections in women.
Some of the more severe and main contributors to the total lifetime QALYs lost for women were chronic pelvic pain (75%) for chlamydia and gonorrhea, and symptomatic trichomoniasis (78%) for trichomoniasis, whereas for men, it was urethritis, which contributed 74% of the total lifetime QALYs lost for chlamydia, 85% for gonorrhea and 92% for trichomoniasis.
“Our estimates of lifetime QALYs lost per infection for each of the three STDs can be used in health economic studies for resource prioritization and planning, and for informing control policies for the three STDs,” Li said.
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Li Y, et al. J Infect Dis. 2023;doi:10.1093/infdis/jiad047.
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