Prevalence of Bacterial Vaginosis among Married Women in Kalar District, Iraqi Kurdistan Region

Abstract Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is an inflammatory disease, caused by polymicrobial infection, including pathogenic bacteria which replace the vaginal normal flora and finally this replacement causes manifestations of several physiological and clinical symptoms among women within different ages. BV has become one of the main problems that make woman patients visit gynecological and obstetric consultant hospitals in most country. The present study is designed to determine the causative pathogen and the prevalence of bacterial vaginosis among married women patients in Kalar district. This cross-sectional study was performed from the beginning of March to the mid April-2021 among women who attended Obstetrics and Gynecological governmental hospital and out-patient clinics in Kalar City. Intra vaginal swabs have been collected in sterile Amies transport medium sticks and processed for isolation and identification of bacterial species depending on colony morphology, Gram’s stain and microbiological analysis protocols. Then socio-demographic and gynaecologic data were collected by questionnaire. Out of the 108 participant women who suffered from Gynecological diseases, 67(62.03%) of them exhibited bacterial vaginosis. From the 73 different isolated colonies, 18 bacterial species were identified; coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS) were the predominant cause of BV (32.84%), followed by E. coli (14.93%), Staphylococcus aureus (13.43%), Klebsiella pneumonia (8.96) and Micrococcus luteus (7.46%), while Proteus spp. and some uncommon bacteria display (1.49%) for each of them. The socio-demographic analysis between positive and negative woman patients revealed that the association between all studied risk factors and BV were statistically significant (P value < 0.05) except the age factor which was statistically non-significant meaning that the age was not associated with BV. In addition, the clinical symptom analysis showed that abnormal vaginal discharge, lower back pain, dysmenorrhea and strawberry were significantly associated with BV (P value < 0.05), while the rest of other factor did not exhibit statistically significant association.