Acceptability of Male Circumcision among College Students in Medical Universities in Western China: A Cross-Sectional Study

Friday, 6th of November 2015

Acceptability of Male Circumcision among College Students in Medical Universities in Western China: A Cross-Sectional Study

Junjun Jiang, Jinming Su, Xiaobo Yang, Mingbo Huang, Wei Deng, Jiegang Huang, Bingyu Liang, Bo Qin, Halmurat Upur, …

Abstract below; full text, with figures, is at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0135706

Background

Male circumcision (MC) has been shown to reduce the risk of female to male transmission of HIV. The goal of this survey was to explore MCs acceptability and the factors associated with MC among college students in medical universities in western China.

Methods

A cross-sectional study was carried out in three provinces in western China (Guangxi, Chongqing and Xinjiang) to assess the acceptability of MC as well as to discover factors associated with the acceptability among college students in medical universities. A total of 1,790 uncircumcised male students from three medical universities were enrolled in this study. In addition, 150 students who had undergone MC were also enrolled in the survey, and they participated in in-depth interviews.

Results

Of all the uncircumcised participants (n = 1,790), 55.2% (n = 988) were willing to accept MC. Among those who accepted MC, 67.3% thought that MC could improve their sexual partners hygiene, 46.3% believed that HIV and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) could be partially prevented by MC. The multivariable logistic regression indicates that MCs acceptability was associated with three factors: the redundant foreskin (OR = 10.171, 95% CI = 7.629–13.559), knowing the hazard of having a redundant foreskin (OR = 1.597, 95% CI = 1.097–2.323), and enhancing sexual pleasure (OR = 1.628, 95% CI = 1.312–2.021). The in-depth interviews for subjects who had undergone MC showed that the major reason for having MC was the redundant foreskin (87.3%), followed by the benefits and the fewer complications of having MC done. In addition, most of these participants (65.3%) said that the MC could enhance sexual satisfaction.

Conclusions

MCs acceptance among college students in medical universities is higher than it is among other populations in western China. An implementation of an MC programme among this population is feasible in the future.

Citation: Jiang J, Su J, Yang X, Huang M, Deng W, Huang J, et al. (2015) Acceptability of Male Circumcision among College Students in Medical Universities in Western China: A Cross-Sectional Study. PLoS ONE 10(9): e0135706. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0135706

Editor: Zhefeng Meng, Fudan University, CHINA

Received: April 25, 2015; Accepted: July 26, 2015; Published: September 21, 2015

Copyright: © 2015 Jiang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: This study was supported by the National Key Science and Technology Project (Grant Number 2008ZX10001-016 and 2012ZX10004910-002). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

At present, the AIDS epidemic in China is still grim. By the end of September 2013, 434,000 people were reported to be living with HIV/AIDS, according to the Chinese Ministry of Health[1]. Currently, sexual transmission continues to be the primary mode of HIV-1 transmission in China, with 69.1% through heterosexual contact and 20.8% through homosexual contact in the newly reported cases[2]. Challenges in HIV/AIDS prevention and control remain critical in some regions, especially in six provinces: Yunnan, Guangxi, Henan, Sichuan, Xinjiang, and Guangdong, accounting for 75.8% of the national total [3]. Four of these high prevalence provinces are located in western China, where a poor economic environment, a widespread high-risk of sexual behaviour, and a lower level of public awareness of HIV/AIDS are believed to account for the high HIV/AIDS prevalence [4].

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda have shown that male circumcision (MC) can reduce the risk of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission in heterosexual men by 50%–60% [5–7]. MC is also an important supplemental strategy for prevention of heterosexually contracted infections in men, and it is recommended by the WHO and UNAIDS [8]. Several other studies have also suggested that uncircumcised men have a higher risk of acquiring sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) including syphilis, gonorrhoea, and chlamydia, than do circumcised men [9, 10]. MC may be more effective in preventing or controlling HIV transmission in countries where HIV prevalence is high, the MC rate is low, and the predominant transmission is through heterosexual behaviours [11, 12].

For the HIV/AIDS epidemic, youth constitute a neglected group. While the global AIDS mortality decreased by 30%, the mortality of infected young people rose 50%, which is a significant increase in mortality during the past ten years [13]. The number of new infections in young students aged 14 to 25 years old has presented an annual increase, which has accounted for a rising proportion of new HIV/AIDS cases, ranging from 0.9% to 1.7% from 2008 to 2012 [14]. In addition, HIV/AIDS-reported cases in students have shown a rising trend from 0.96% in 2006 to 1.64% in 2011. Among them, the proportion of those aged 20 to 24 years old increased from 20.3% in 2006 to 49.0% in 2011[3]. All of these facts indicate that HIV/AIDS infections are trending toward the younger population, with the ratio of the disease contracted through sexual transmission on the rise among college students. College students are a high risk group for HIV infection as well as they are one of the focus populations for AIDS prevention [15]. They are prone to high-risk sexual behaviours because many college students are sexually active, have liberal attitudes towards sex, and are under social and personal pressure [16]. College students accounted for 55% of reported premarital sexual behaviour [17]. Furthermore, a study with 2,841 students participating found that 63.3% of college students have reported to begin having sex during their university education [18]. If college students are lacking in relevant sexual knowledge and prevention awareness, they will have a high risk of acquiring HIV.

Traditional prevention methods have not been as effective for HIV/AIDS prevention, thus new strategies, such as MC, are urgently needed to increase the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS prevention and control. MC has a high efficiency, fewer complications, and has a low cost measure for preventing HIV acquisition in males. In China, only about 5% of Chinese males have undergone MC, which is much lower than the overall rate of MC (30–34%) in the world [19, 20]. Investigations of MC acceptability have been conducted in several countries, including in sub-Saharan Africa, The United States, and Thailand [21–23], and MC is a very common in these areas. However, MC is not a common practice in China. It is a critical issue to promote MC in China.

In this study, we selected medical college students to investigate their HIV-1 knowledge, cognition, attitude, and willingness to accept, and the influencing factors for MC. We focused on medical college students for several reasons. First, medical students have professional medical knowledge and could become the pioneers of promoting an MC programme. Second, an investigation of medical students not only could improve this populations MC knowledge, but it could also contribute to the increase of their MC acceptability. Third, we expect that medical college students could have a demonstration effect in receiving MC that might better develop the promotional material of circumcision among other populations, including non-medical students and other HIV-1 high-risk populations in China.

Methods

Study design and subjects

A cross-sectional survey was conducted in the form of face-to-face structured interviews in three universities in western China (Guangxi Medical University, Chongqing Medical University and Xinjiang Medical University) between June 2009 and November 2010. Participants were enrolled from their freshmen to their senior years of medical studies by a random cluster sampling method.

Meanwhile, a qualitative research was carried out through in-depth interviews. Male medical students in three universities who had undergone MC previously were recruited for this research. The recruitment was stopped when the addition of new subjects could not offer useful information. Eventually, though, a total of 150 students were recruited.

The subjects who were unable to provide voluntarily informed consent were excluded. The study was approved by the Ethics and Human Subjects Committee (EHSC) of the Guangxi Medical University.

Questionnaires and data management

A 52-item questionnaire was designed with the main purpose of obtaining information on the acceptability of MC as an effective strategy to prevent HIV (i.e. willingness to be circumcised”). The questionnaire has four sub-sections: demographic characteristics, general knowledge about MC and AIDS, willingness and reasons for accepting or refusing MC, and factors associated with the willingness to be circumcised. A few open-ended questions were asked. Most of the primary outcome variables were assessed by close-ended questions, such as “Do you know that MC can prevent AIDS and STDs?” with response categories of "Yes/No".

Twenty-three questions were asked to assess the participants knowledge about AIDS and MC, including 11 questions about general knowledge of AIDS, such as the pathway of HIV transmission and infection; and 12 questions were asked about MC, for example, the most suitable period and targeted population, and the advantages compared to the adverse effects after surgery [24].

For AIDS knowledge, we computed the average score among all of the interviewed subjects. The AIDS knowledge section of the questionnaire was scored with one point given to each correct answer, while wrong answers or answers that that showed the respondent did not know were scored as zero. Respondents willingness to accept MC was assessed with the question "Do you want to be circumcised to prevent HIV?", and the response categories were "definitely willing", "probably willing", "definitely not willing" and "probably not willing". For analysis, we dichotomized the groups of "definitely willing" and "probably willing" into a single variable of "willingness to be circumcised (WTC)", and the groups of "definitely not willing" and "probably not willing" were categorized as "unwillingness to be circumcised (non-WTC)". To assess reasons for accepting or refusing MC, 12 open-/close-ended questions were asked for the advantages and disadvantages of MC and surgery costs, etc. Data were collected by trained Research Assistants (RAs). After the subjects provided their written informed consents to participate in the study, RAs conducted the detailed interviews following the structured guidelines.

We carried out the qualitative research by face-to-face interviews. The research contents include the reasons for MC, complications of MC, postoperative feelings, and the relationship between the foreskin and HIV.

Analysis

All the data were entered into EpiData software (EpiData 3.1 for Windows; The EpiData Association Odense, Denmark) and analysed using SPSS for Windows Version 16.0 (SPSS, Chicago, IL, USA). Descriptive statistics were generated for each of the variables, corresponding to specific questions in the survey, including general characteristics and reasons for accepting or refusing MC. To compare basic characteristics between the two groups, we used a chi-squared test. We performed a multivariate logistic regression analysis to identify factors associated with MCs acceptability. Variables that showed statistically significant associations (p<0.05) with the willingness to be circumcised were included in a univariate analysis. All statistical tests were two sided with a significant level of p<0.05.