Vitamin B’s vaginal benefits: Supplementation boosts conventional yeast infection treatment, RCT finds

Adding vitamin B supplementation alongside conventional treatment can help treat cases of complicated vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC), according to two studies.

VVC, a fungal infections caused by Candida species, is the second major cause of vaginitis in women after bacterial vaginitis.

About 75% premenopausal women are infected with VVC at least once in a lifetime, among which 5% will experience recurrent VVC.

Writing in the journal Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, researchers from China said are antifungal agents like nystatin and fluconazole are common treatments for VVC.

“But the complexity of complicated VVC contributes to different degrees of drug resistance in the clinical course of treatment,” they said.

Therefore, the combined use of vitamins and anti-fungal agents is proposed to improve the cure rate of VVC.”

For their study, 158 VVC patients were randomly divided into group A (treated with suppository and oral antifungal agents), group B (treated with suppository and vaginal cream), and group C (treated with suppository, vaginal cream and oral vitamin B complex).

After the treatment, complicated patients in the group C had significantly higher effective rates than those in the group A and group B.

“The effective rate was defined as the percentage of patients with recovery, marked effective and improvement. Effective rate of patients in the group C was 92.73%, which is significantly higher than those in the A (73.47%) and B (79.63%) groups.”

In terms of the recovery rate, compared with group A (61.22%) and group B (62.96%), group C (72.73%) also performed better.

Mouse model

Separately, a mouse model of VVC was established. Eighty VVC mice were randomly divided into four groups according to the dose of vitamin B complex (20 mice in each group): V1 group (injected with 150 μL normal salin), V2 group (injected with 50 μL vitamin B complex solution and 100 μL normal saline), V3 group (injected with 100 μL vitamin B complex solution and 50 μL normal saline), and V4 group (injected with 150 μL vitamin B complex solution).

There was significant difference between mice treated with different dosages of vitamin B complex. The inflammatory response of mice in the V1 group was significantly higher than those in other groups and the inflammation response reduced with the increase of vitamin B complex dosage.

“The vitamin B complex elevated the curative effects of fluconazole on VVC model of vaginal epithelial cells and significantly increased the anti-fungal effect of fluconazole,” wrote the researchers from The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University.

They concluded that vitamin B complex could be an effective adjuvant therapy for complicated VVC.

 

Source: Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopha.2017.01.001

“Efficacy of vitamin B complex as an adjuvant therapy for the treatment of complicated vulvovaginal candidiasis: An in vivo and in vitro study”

Authors: Yun-Xia Cao, et al.