Abstract
Bacterial vaginosis (BV) in pregnancy is related to numerous adverse events; however,
the validity of different methods of vaginal swab collection to diagnosis BV among
pregnant women is unclear. This study examines the validity of self-collected compared
with provider-collected vaginal swabs and describes the intra-rater and inter-rater
reliability of BV assessment among a sample of pregnant women early in gestation.
Gram-stain evaluation of vaginal samples using the Nugent criteria was conducted to
determine the overall and morphotype-specific BV scores. We found strong validity
for the overall and morphotype-specific scores comparing self-collected swabs to provider-collected
swabs. In addition, we found excellent overall and morphotype-specific inter-rater
reliability and excellent intra-rater reliability in our sample. These study results
support the use of self-collected vaginal swabs for diagnosing BV and document the
reliability of BV assessment among pregnant women.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Accepted:
March 4,
2003
Identification
Copyright
© 2003 Elsevier Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
