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Updated: Aug 14, 2026

Modeling Healthy and Dysbiotic Vaginal Microenvironments in a Human Vagina-on-a-Chip
Published on: February 16, 2024
Teratogenic potential of vaginal metronidazole treatment during pregnancy
Zoltán Kazy1, Erzsébet Puhó, Andrew E Czeizel
1Foundation for the Community Control of Hereditary Diseases, Törökvész lejto 32, 1026 Budapest, Hungary.
Objective:
To study the human teratogenic potential of vaginal metronidazole treatment during pregnancy.
Design And Setting:
The analysis of cases with different congenital abnormalities and their matched controls in the population-based data set of the large Hungarian Case-Control Surveillance of Congenital Abnormalities (HCCSCA), 1980-1996.
Study Participants:
Pregnant women (38,151) who had newborn infants without any congenital abnormalities (control group), 22,843 pregnant women who had newborn infants or fetuses with congenital abnormalities.
Main Outcome Measures:
Twenty-two congenital abnormality groups.
Results:
The prevalence of vaginal metronidazole treatment during pregnancy was 1.7% in the case group (388 pregnant women), while it was 1.5% in the control group (570 pregnant women) [crude prevalence odds ratio (POR) with 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.1, 1.0-1.3]. Comparisons of cases and their matched controls showed an association between vaginal metronidazole treatment during the second and third months of gestation and congenital hydrocephalus (adjusted POR with 95% CI: 10.7, 1.1-104.5), however, based only on five cases. The evaluation of medically recorded metronidazole treatment did not confirm this association.
Conclusion:
Our finding can only be regarded as a signal for the possible association between vaginal treatment with metronidazole during pregnancy and congenital hydrocephalus.
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