You’re not going to like this.
It can be hard enough to convince your other half to *look after you*, but they might be even more reluctant to go down after reading this.
Scientists at John Hopkins University have found that men with a high number of sexual partners are more at risk of serious illness if they engage in oral sex.
The study was published in the Annals of Oncology and examined the health data of over 13,000 people aged 20-69 over the space of five years between 2009 and 2014.
The illness being investigated was the rise in Human papillomavirus (HPV), and other related neck and mouth cancers and the scientists wanted to know which groups were at risk the most.
The results stated that the risk of these oral cancers is low among people in the 20-69 age bracket but according to the paper, the figure doubled for men who had five or more oral sexual partners during their lifetime and at 7.3 per cent, they were in the ‘medium risk’ category.
Those in the high-risk category saw the figures jump by double again to 14.9 per cent and those in this group were people who were also smokers.
The illness of HPV was found to be low among all the participants regardless of factors such as smoking when the person involved in the study had one or fewer lifetime oral sex partners.
However, men aged 20-69 with 10 or more oral sex partners had a 14.4 per cent chance of getting oncogenic which causes tumours that develop oral HPV.
Lead author of the study, Amber D’Souza, said men are much more likely to contract the virus than women.
“Most people perform oral sex in their lives, and we found that oral infection with cancer-causing HPV was rare among women regardless of how many oral sex partners they had,” she said.
“Among men who did not smoke, cancer-causing oral HPV was rare among everyone who had less [sp] than five oral sex partners, although the chances of having oral HPV infection did increase with number of oral sexual partners, and with smoking.”
