Millions of Girls May Be Getting Unnecessary Pelvic Exams, CDC Finds
Millions of girls and young women may have been subjected to invasive pelvic exams and pap smears they didn't need, according to estimates from researchers at the University of California San Francisco and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A new study, states that as many as 1.4 million patients between the ages of 15 and 20 may have had unnecessary pelvic exams within a year.
The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology
no longer recommends pelvic exams — which involve a physician inserting
two fingers into the vagina, to check for abnormalities or infection —
for most people under the age of 21, and hasn't since 2009.
If a patient presents with particular symptoms, such as pain or the
inability to insert a tampon; or if they are pregnant; or if they are
getting an IUD, a manual exam could be warranted. But many people find the exams painful or uncomfortable,
and given the potential risk of “false-positive test results,
over-diagnosis, anxiety, and unnecessary costs,” as the authors point
out in the study, there’s not much reason to perform them on people in
this age group. There are less invasive STI-testing methods available,
and while HPV has long been a concern for young people, pap smears to
test for cervical cancer also aren’t recommended until the patients turn 21.
And
yet pap smears, according to the study, tended to accompany pelvic
exams. The researchers analyzed survey data from 2011 to 2017, sourced
from 3,410 girls and young women aged 15 to 20. Very few respondents
reported STI treatment (4.5 percent), pregnancy (4.8 percent), or IUD
use (2 percent) within a 12-month period. Still, within the same time
frame, about 2.6 million girls and young women in the same age bracket
reported having received a pelvic exam, and 2.2 million said they’d
received pap smears. Based on the data, the researchers concluded that
54.4 percent of those exams, and 71.9 percent of those pap tests, may
have been unnecessary.
Dr.
George Sawaya — professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive
sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and the study’s
lead author — told that the team didn’t know why these procedures remained so widespread, although it may have something to do with habit.
Nonetheless that researchers “want to empower
girls and young women to ask, ‘Why do I need this exam?’” if their
gynecologist suggests one. To judge by this data, there’s a good chance
they don’t.