Are you getting the right STD tests?

The lowdown on STD tests. Photo: Getty Images.

Ask your doc to screen you for chlamydia or gonorrhea, and chances are, she’s going to check your hoo-ha. But according to new research, if she isn’t also checking your throat and backside, your screening might miss something.

For the study, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers followed 10,389 people, 4,402 of them women, who visited STD clinics. While the current testing protocol for gonorrhea and chlamydia is to screen the genitals and/or take a urine sample, the clinics also performed throat screenings on everyone who reported a history of oral sex and rectal screenings for those who reported a history of anal sex.

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They found that if those women had only received genital and urine screenings, nearly 14 per cent of chlamydia infections and more than 30 per cent of gonorrhea infections would have gone unnoticed. Women who were 18 or younger were four times more likely than the other women in the study to be diagnosed with chlamydia or gonorrhea infections outside of the genital area.

So Do You Need Extra Screenings?

It depends. While generally not fatal, gonorrhea and chlamydia are bacterial infections that can cause health problems if left untreated. Among the biggest concerns is infertility, says Dr. Alyssa Dweck, coauthor of V is for Vagina.

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However, with infection in the throat and/or rectum, that’s not really an issue. “The long-term effects of extragenital [outside of the genitals] infections in women are just not as onerous as they are with genital infections for women,” she says.

That being said, it's still important to get treated if you have one of these STDs in an area other than the genitals since they rarely go away on their own and they can still be spread to other areas of the body through sexual contact.

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And while nearly 14 per cent of chlamydia infections and more than 30 per cent of gonorrhea infections in women going undiagnosed is scary, in the grand scheme of things, that’s not very many women, given how many were part of the entire study.

Only 2.4 per cent of the women screened in the study actually had extragenital gonorrhea infections, and only 3.7 percent of them actually had extragenital chlamydia infections. While the study notes that some people have brought up the possibility of false positives with throat and rectal screenings, the researchers say that it doesn’t appear to be an issue.

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On the flip side, 18.9 per cent of men who have sex with men had extragenital gonorrhea infections, and 11.8 per cent had extragenital chlamydia infections.

What’s more, in the Johns Hopkins study, clinicians only screened women for oral and anal STD infections if they reported having performed oral sex or received anal sex, says Dweck. Women are incredibly unlikely to contract either infection without engaging in those sexual behaviors.

She recommends talking to your gynecologist about extragenital screenings if you engage in oral or anal sex and to always use protection.