Not All of the Cases of Mycoplasma Infection Need Treatment
Mycoplasma is a disease easily to spread, and it can cause great harm to human’s body, people should be treated once they found the relevant symptoms. However, Not all the cases need to be treated.
1. What is mycoplasma?
Mycoplasma is the smallest prokaryotic microorganism that lacks a cell wall, which is highly polymorphic, can pass through the bacteria filter, grow and reproduce in an inanimate medium.
Mycoplasma belongs to a large family with 199 species. There are 16 species of mycoplasma isolated from the human body, 7 of which are pathogenic to human body.Ureaplasma urealyticum (Uu), Mycoplasma hominis (Mh) and Mycoplasma genitalium (Mg) are common Mycoplasma associated with genitourinary tract infection.
2. Where does Mycoplasma exist?
Mycoplasma colonization exists in the genitourinary tract, around the vagina, urethral orifice, cervical orifice, and urine, it spreads mainly through sexual contact.
Although the rate of detection of Ureaplasma urealyticum by vaginal culture is higher, there is often no clear clinical significance. Therefore, though mycoplasma is detected through timely clinical detection, patients still have to decide whether they should receive treatment or not after comprehensive judgment.
3. What are the clinical symptoms?
Most patients have no obvious discomfort, a few patients have vaginal tenesmus. When the infection spreads to the urethra, frequent and urgent urination will occur.
Mycoplasma is a common pathogenic microorganism in urinary tract infection. Urethritis is the most common urinary tract disease caused by mycoplasma, and other diseases include pyelonephritis. At present, 35%~50% of non-gonococcal urethritis is associated with Chlamydia infection and 20%~40% with Mycoplasma infection.
If patients are infected with urethritis, they will have flushing of the urethral orifice, congestion, and extrusion of the urethra with a small amount of secretion overflow, but tenderness rarely occurs.
4. How to detect mycoplasma?
(1) Cervical and vaginal swabs
The method is to expose the cervix with a dilator, insert a sterile cotton swab into the cervix at a distance of 1-2 cm, gently rotate the secretion of columnar epithelial cells and detect it.
(2) Urine test
The method is to take midstream urine for examination, its advantages include noninvasive, convenient, sensitive and specific.
5. Therapeutic Principles
(1) If both men and women have no symptoms associated with genitourinary tract infection, only the result of a mycoplasma test is positive, they can be considered as carriers, and no treatment is needed.
(2) If the symptoms and signs of frequent and urgent urination have disappeared after the mycoplasma infection treatment. Even if the results of the mycoplasma examination are positive, it is necessary to consider whether you become the carriers of mycoplasma and consider stopping the medication.
(3) If the result of the mycoplasma test was positive in men and diagnosed as mycoplasma urethritis. It is suggested that sexual partners should be treated at the same time, and unprotected sexual intercourse should be avoided during the period.
(4) When the male mycoplasma is positive with abnormal semen quality and reproductive needs, both men and women should take a course of treatment at the same time.
(5) When treating pelvic inflammatory disease, we should consider that mycoplasma may be involved in the pathogenesis of the pelvic inflammatory disease, and the antimicrobial spectrum should cover mycoplasma.
6. What if I get mycoplasma infection during pregnancy?
A multicenter clinical study involving more than 4,900 pregnant women was conducted in the United States in the last century. The results showed that the colonization of Ureaplasma urealyticum during the second trimester of pregnancy had no significant correlation with low birth weight, premature rupture of membranes and premature birth.
At present, most clinical studies do not consider it necessary to intervene and treat patients with Uu detected in the inferior genital tract during pregnancy.
7. Does mycoplasma have an effect on IVF?
Many studies have shown that positive Uu culture in the genital tract of both men and women has no significant effect on the IVF fertilization rate, abnormal fertilization rate, cleavage rate, clinical pregnancy rate, and abortion rate. It is believed that positive Uu culture in the cervix does not affect the pregnancy outcome of in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer.
8. How to treat it?
Normally, it takes a long time to treat mycoplasma infection, and the therapeutic effect is not so obvious. Erythromycin and tetracycline were considered as the first antibiotics with definite curative effect, and the course of treatment was usually 7-10 days.
Generally speaking, josamycin, doxycycline, and minocycline are all more than 90% sensitive to mycoplasma, and they are the main antibiotics for the treatment of mycoplasma. If necessary, antibiotics can be selected according to the results of the susceptibility test.
If antibiotics are ineffective or you are concerned about the side effects of antibiotics, you can also try Diuretic and Anti-inflammatory Pill, which can effectively eliminate chlamydia and prevent its spread to other organs. It can also repair the genitourinary tract mucosa damaged by chlamydia, improve the sperm quality, and treat chlamydia and its complications in many ways.
9. Regular review
Patients with mycoplasma infection need follow-ups after treatment and should be reexamined by culture method two weeks after stop taking drugs.
- Previous article：Will Ureaplasma Urealyticum Affect the Rate of Pregnancy?
- Next article：The Best Time for Pre-pregnancy Mycoplasma examination
