Abstract
The vaginal microbiota has importance in preserving vaginal health and defending the host against disease. The advent of new molecular techniques and computer science has allowed researchers to discover microbial composition in depth and associate the structure of vaginal microbial communities. There is a consensus that vaginal flora is grouped into a restricted number of communities, although the structure of the community is constantly changing. Certain Community-State Types (CSTs) are more associated with poor reproductive outcomes and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) meanwhile, CSTs dominated by Lactobacillus species—particularly Lactobacillus crispatus—are more related to vaginal health. In this work, we have reviewed how modifiable and non-modifiable factors may affect normal vaginal microbiota homeostasis—including sexual behavior, race or ethnicity, and hygiene. Special interest has been given to how the use of probiotics, diet intake, and use of hormone replacement therapies (HRTs) can potentially impact vaginal microbiota composition.
Highlights
The human body accommodates ecological communities of commensal, symbiotic and pathogenic organisms—known as the microbiota—that reside on surfaces and cavities exposed or not to the exterior environment [1]
It is in this squamous epithelium where microorganism communities, formerly called the vaginal microbiota, reside
This vaginal microbiota might play a crucial role in gynecologic wellness and in healthy women, consists classically of a diversity of anaerobic and aerobic microorganisms, with the lactobacilli species being the most predominant microorganisms with a determinant function in preventing urogenital diseases such as bacterial vaginosis (BV), yeast infections, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), urinary tract infections, and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infections [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]
Summary
The human body accommodates ecological communities of commensal, symbiotic and pathogenic organisms—known as the microbiota—that reside on surfaces and cavities exposed or not to the exterior environment [1]. The impact that microbiota communities have on the host human body was revealed by studies led by the National Institute of Health in 2008 with the development of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP). In the context of genomics, the term microbiome denotes either the collective genetic material of microbiota microorganisms that reside in an environmental niche or the microorganisms themselves. This term, microbiome, has generated some controversy in the scientific community since its definition. It is argued that this is the definition of the metagenome, which, combined with the environment, constitutes the microbiome
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