A Qualitative Exploration of Women’s Experiences of Living with Chronic Vulvar Dermatoses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Many vulvar dermatoses (VDs) are chronic and cannot be "cured," thus affected women must learn to live with the impact of the disease, and its treatment, on their quality of life. AIM: To qualitatively investigate the impact of VDs on women's quality of life through firsthand accounts. METHODS: 12 women, 7 with lichen sclerosus and 5 with erosive vulvovaginal lichen planus recruited from a vulvar disease clinic participated in in-depth, exploratory interviews. Scripts were analyzed by applying a thematic network. The following steps were used: (1) coding the text, (2) development of descriptive themes, and (3) generation of thematic networks. OUTCOMES: The main outcome explored was the narrative experiences of women living with VDs. RESULTS: A global theme of suffering emerged. Themes associated with this suffering were organized under the themes of isolation, interference, and grieving. Women felt isolated because they felt unable to talk about their suffering; experienced a lack of external validation and support; and felt different as individuals, women, and sexual beings. Most women expressed negative views of their genitalia. Women spoke of the VDs, and its management, as interfering with thoughts, activities, and sex life. Symptoms were described as all-encompassing. Women spoke about limiting and/or avoiding daily activities and, in particular, sexual activities. Women described diminished sexual pleasure and experienced loss in their intimate relationships. Women described an ongoing grieving process; anger and sadness over the loss of their former healthy self; the burden of ongoing treatment; and attempts to cope and accept their current condition. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: The findings suggest that assessment of women with VDs should include a detailed history of the impact of the VDs on women's psychological and sexual health. STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS: A strength of this study is that we openly explored the lived experiences of women who had been clinically diagnosed with vulvar lichen sclerosus and erosive vulvovaginal lichen planus. A limitation is that the findings may not represent the experience of women living with VDs who do not wish to discuss their VDs or who are undiagnosed, untreated, and/or treated by other health-care providers. CONCLUSIONS: Women described profound impact of VDs on psychological and sexual health. Sadownik LA, Koert E, Maher C, et al. A Qualitative Exploration of Women's Experiences of Living With Chronic Vulvar Dermatoses. J Sex Med 2020;17:1740-1750.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".