New research explains why — and why it's not acceptable.
Credit: Cosmopolitan
In incredibly unfair news, lesbian women may have a higher risk of cervical cancer than heterosexual women for the all-time dumbest reason: Lesbians are less likely to be screened for HPV, the virus that causes cervical cancer when left untreated, according to a new review of existing research recently published in Nurse Practitioner journal.
Researchers already know that lesbian women tend to have more cervical cancer risk factors, which include higher body mass index, greater alcohol consumption, and higher rates of smoking. But this new review reveals that lesbians are screened at a 5 to18 percent lower rate than heterosexual women — even though all women are supposed to start screenings (which involve a Pap smear) at age 21, get rechecked every three years until age 30, and repeat testing every five years until age 65.
Credit: Huffington Post
It's not that doctors have it out for lesbians. The truth is that healthy homosexual women are less likely to visit their ob-gyns for preventative care because, unlike sexually active heterosexual women, they're less likely to need their doctors to prescribe birth control prescriptions or manage pregnancy, according to study co-author Joachim Voss, Ph.D., a professor at University of Washington. (And it doesn't help that lesbian women are also less likely to have health insurance.)
But doctors aren't entirely in the clear here: When lesbian women do make it to the gyno, doctors may not test them because they assume that women who have sex with other women don't have sex with men, which is how HPV is commonly transmitted. But that's not entirely true — research shows that most lesbian women and their female partners have had sex with men. Of course that's still besides the point, since you can contract HPV from skin-to-skin contact (including manual stimulation), oral sex, or through contact with shared sex toys — all without a penis present.
Credit: Huffington Post
The bottom line is that every woman needs to seek out preventative health care, and lesbians are no exception. If you can't remember the last time you got a Pap smear, get your butt to the gyno, pronto. And make sure your partner does too.
Source: Cosmopolitan