Research reveals that circumcision seems to change the microbiome of the penis

For some, cir­cum­ci­sion is a reli­gious and cul­tur­al act.

Oth­ers make deci­sions for health rea­sons. How­ev­er, even among med­ical sci­en­tists, not all agree that remov­ing the fore­skin in boys is real­ly clin­i­cal­ly beneficial.

A recent small study of 11 boys in the Unit­ed States found evi­dence that remov­ing the skin that cov­ers the tip of the penis alters the abun­dance and com­po­si­tion of the bac­te­r­i­al and fun­gal com­mu­ni­ties that nat­u­ral­ly live there. I was.

Some bac­te­r­i­al com­mu­ni­ties that have decreased after cir­cum­ci­sion have been linked to inflam­ma­tion and sex­u­al­ly trans­mit­ted infec­tions (STIs) in oth­er studies.

This ten­ta­tive­ly sug­gests that cir­cum­ci­sion may reduce a per­son­’s sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty to STIs by lim­it­ing inflam­ma­tion in penile tis­sue and viral tar­gets in the skin.

Although the micro­bio­me is a new fron­tier for sci­en­tif­ic research, and we are gain­ing a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how the microbes that pop­u­late our bod­ies affect our health, the penile micro­bio­me is, for exam­ple, the gut and vagi­nal microbiome.

Com­pared to bio­mes, they are much less researched.

To date, data are lim­it­ed and con­trolled stud­ies of cir­cum­ci­sion are lack­ing from which no con­clu­sions can be drawn. It is often over­looked, espe­cial­ly giv­en pre­vi­ous stud­ies with null results.

The the­o­ry that cir­cum­ci­sion pre­vents STIs has exist­ed since at least the 19th cen­tu­ry. A sci­en­tist named Jonathan Hutchin­son claimed that cir­cum­cised Jews in Lon­don were more pro­tect­ed from syphilis than uncir­cum­cised areas.

Oth­er sci­en­tists at the time, how­ev­er, argued that Hutchin­son was jump­ing to his con­clu­sions too quick­ly. Cor­re­la­tion and cau­sa­tion do not match, they warn. This sta­tis­ti­cal asso­ci­a­tion may be influ­enced by oth­er con­found­ing factors.

The same debate per­sists today, with both think­ing they are act­ing more sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly and evi­dence-based than the other.

Over the years, dozens of obser­va­tion­al stud­ies and sev­er­al ran­dom­ized clin­i­cal tri­als have found evi­dence to sug­gest that cir­cum­ci­sion, at least to some extent, can pro­tect peo­ple from some STIs.

For exam­ple, meta-analy­ses based on aggre­gat­ed data have found that cir­cum­ci­sion is asso­ci­at­ed with a reduc­tion in bac­te­r­i­al infec­tions such as syphilis and viral infec­tions such as gen­i­tal her­pes and her­pes sim­plex virus type 2.

In 2020, cir­cum­cised adults have a dif­fer­ent penile micro­bio­me than uncir­cum­cised adults, which to some extent pro­tects the for­mer group from infec­tion with bac­te­r­i­al vagi­nosis and human immun­od­e­fi­cien­cy virus (HIV/AIDS).

Two stud­ies found evi­dence that it does.