Probiotic and Tea Tree Oil Treatments Improve Therapy of Vaginal Candidiasis: A Preliminary Clinical Study

Recent studies have documented that 29-49% of women has been affected by vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC) at least once in the lifetime and about 10% of them has history of recurrent VVC.Tea tree oil (TTO), an essential oil extracted by steam distillation from the leaves of Melaleuca alternifolia tree, has been known for many years for its antiseptic properties. Currently, TTO is used in vaginal suppositories (VS) for the treatment of vaginal candidiasis. TTO-VS exhibits an in vitro fungicidal activity towards Candida spp., only slightly affecting some vaginal lactobacilli population isolated from patients with vaginitis (Di Vito et al. 2015). However, preclinical and clinical studies addressing efficacy and safety profile are still few and not exhaustive, especially with regard to the complex vaginal microbial environment.On this basis, we have investigated the efficacy and safety profile of a combined therapy with probiotics and TTO-VS on female volunteers with vaginitis in order to find alternatives to fight the growing antimicrobial resistance to the most common synthetic antifungal remedies