Should You Analyze Your Vaginal Microbiome?
Bacteria and other microbes living in the vagina are extremely important to our health, but (like microbes in other parts of the body) they are not well understood. The company is now offering free vaginal microbiome reports to women who are joining their research.
The company is Juno Bio , a startup that aims to study the vaginal microbiome. Their website does not specify exactly what questions the study is focusing on, but they point to bacterial vaginosis and infertility as issues worth investigating. The plan seems to be to use machine learning to understand the microbiome, which is extremely complex and changes from person to person and day to day.
Right now, knowing what’s in your microbiome (vaginal or otherwise) won’t give you any actionable data about your health. Several years ago, when I was pregnant, I was involved in a similar study. I sent in my swabs and excitedly opened the letter I received a few weeks later, only to see … a list of bacterial taxa. Great? The results were amazing in “oh, science!” in a way (I’m a nerd), but we just don’t know enough about the microbiome to actually do anything with that information on an individual level.
Juno stresses that their test is not diagnostic. In other words, you won’t know if you have health problems. (In fact, they are more likely to ask you about your health concerns: the study involves completing a survey.) The company clarified in a Reddit post that members’ personal information remains private and that this data is not linked to your name after they submit you your results.
So, if you are curious about your microbiome and want to provide the company with some of your data without knowing exactly what it might lead to, the registration link is here . They recruit women aged 19 years and older living in the continental United States. (The company wrote on Reddit that “we could improve some of the wording regarding eligibility to make it more inclusive for our trans and non-binary friends,” but their form still has the mandatory “I’m a woman” checkbox.)
Updated on 11/13/2019 at 4:54 pm to clarify that Juno describes one of the selection criteria as “woman”.