[Adolescents find it easy to collect their own samples to study sexually transmitted infections]

As alternative for patients that fear genital examination, we assessed adolescent's comfort and ease with self-collected samples for nucleic acid amplification testing for sexually transmitted infections.

Sexually active Chilean adolescents and youth under 25 years (174 males and 117 females) were enrolled. Females used self-collected vaginal swabs and males collected first-stream urine. A satisfaction survey evaluating self-sampling system was applied.

Self-collection was considered easy in 99.3% of the interviewees (CI 95% 0.88-0.98). In women, 79.3% preferred vaginal self-collected samples than pelvic exam (CI 95% 0.73-0.85). In men, 80.3% preferred self-collected first-stream urine to urethral swabs (CI 95% 0.73-0.87). Assuming that self-collected sampling were available, 89.6% of women (CI 95% 0.85-0.94) and 93.2% of men (CI 95% 0.89-0.98) would be prone to be tested more often. Ease of self-collected sampling is not associated with age, gender, educational level or poverty.

Chile currently does not have sexually transmitted infections surveillance or screening programs for youth and adolescents. Given self-collected sampling's good acceptability, it could be successfully used when these programs are implemented.