[Adolescents find it easy to collect their own samples to study sexually transmitted infections].

BACKGROUND

As alternative for patients that fear genital examination, we assessed adolescent's comfort and ease with self-collected samples for nucleic acid amplification testing for sexually transmitted infections.

PATIENTS AND METHODS

Sexually active Chilean adolescents and youth under 25 years (174 males and 117 females) were enrolled. Females used self-collected vaginal swabs and males collected first-stream urine. A satisfaction survey evaluating self-sampling system was applied.

RESULTS

Self-collection was considered easy in 99.3% of the interviewees (CI 95% 0.88-0.98). In women, 79.3% preferred vaginal self-collected samples than pelvic exam (CI 95% 0.73-0.85). In men, 80.3% preferred self-collected first-stream urine to urethral swabs (CI 95% 0.73-0.87). Assuming that self-collected sampling were available, 89.6% of women (CI 95% 0.85-0.94) and 93.2% of men (CI 95% 0.89-0.98) would be prone to be tested more often. Ease of self-collected sampling is not associated with age, gender, educational level or poverty.

CONCLUSIONS

Chile currently does not have sexually transmitted infections surveillance or screening programs for youth and adolescents. Given self-collected sampling's good acceptability, it could be successfully used when these programs are implemented.