Global Rates and Prevalence of Urogenital Mycoplasmosis: Assembly of a Dataset from Peer-Reviewed Literature*

Jennifer A. Jones, Nufar Chaban, Meghan May

Department of Biological Sciences, Fisher College of Science and Mathematics, Towson University, Towson, USA.

DOI: 10.4236/ojmm.2013.32017                

Abstract

Rates of urogenital mycoplasmosis associated with Mycoplasma genitalium, Mycoplasma hominis, Ureaplasma urealyticum, and Ureaplasma parvum have been reported numerous times, and frequently show a wide range of findings. Differing diagnostic techniques, population targeting, temporal and spatial data collection, and coincident infections make the conclusions from these analyses difficult to compare. We generated a single data set including the infection rate, geographic location, year, study population, diagnostic method, and clinical signs for these organisms by performing literature searches with the species names and compiling the findings. Studies focusing on basic research or reporting clinical surveys where these criteria were not reported were excluded. A statistical analysis of the dataset parameters found that: diagnostic method does not significantly correlate with positive specimen rate but does correlate with the year of publication, and the number of publications correlated significantly with year, indicating that this topic is of growing interest. Further analysis indicated that Ureaplasma species infection rate is significantly higher in pregnant women across all studies. Associations with distinct clinical presentation could not be made on datasets assembled across studies due to the number of confounding variables presented in each. The generated data set represents a large amount of temporal, geographic, and clinical data that can be utilized in future communications.

Keywords

Mycoplasma genitalium; Mycoplasma hominis; Ureaplasma; Urogenital Mycoplasma

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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