What are the symptoms? Symptoms can occur within 2-14 days after infection. However, a person may have chlamydia for months, or even years, without knowing it.
Chlamydia can lie dormant in your body for many years and cause a low-grade infection that rarely presents any flare-ups. There is a greater chance of flare-up if your immune system has become weakened due to a cold or flu, cancer, HIV, or other severe illnesses.
What happens if you leave chlamydia untreated for 3 years? Chlamydia is an infection and, in many people, may continue to spread throughout the body. Leaving a chlamydia infection untreated for years increases the risk of developing serious complications such as pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) and further infections.
On the other hand, if you don't get tested or don't see a healthcare provider for treatment, chlamydia can live in the body for weeks, months, or even years without being detected. This can lead to long-term complications, including infertility.
Chlamydia is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the UK. In 2018 alone, 49% of all new diagnoses of STDs were Chlamydia. A possible reason for this is that the Chlamydia can lay dormant for many years without the carrier knowing.
An untreated chlamydia infection can persist for several years. Although this goes for both men and women, it is believed that men are less likely to carry the bacteria for several years. If you remain infected for a long time you have an increased risk of complications.
What are the symptoms? Symptoms can occur within 2-14 days after infection. However, a person may have chlamydia for months, or even years, without knowing it.
Most people who have chlamydia don't notice any symptoms.
If you do get symptoms, these usually appear between 1 and 3 weeks after having unprotected sex with an infected person. For some people they don't develop until many months later. Sometimes the symptoms can disappear after a few days.
Although chlamydia is highly contagious, it does not always transmit to a person's sexual partners. It is also possible to have a false-negative test result. Having more frequent sex with a partner who has chlamydia may increase a person's risk of contracting it.
The only way to properly check for the presence of this sexually-transmitted infection is through a laboratory test. A swab is taken from just inside the urethra in men or from the urethra or cervix in women, and then sent to a lab for identification.
While long-term problems in men are rare, some men with untreated chlamydia may develop epididymitis. This refers to inflammation in the epididymis, a coiled tube at the back of the testicles that is responsible for storing and carrying sperm.
Without medical intervention, a chlamydia infection can persist for years if gone unnoticed [1]. Fortunately, once diagnosed, a healthcare provider can provide patients with the right medication to treat the sexually transmitted infection (STI).
There is no clear timeline on how long it may take for this to occur - while one study suggests that after exposure to the bacteria, it can take a few weeks for PID to develop, the NHS estimates that 1 in 10 women with untreated chlamydia could go on to develop PID within a year.
This leads us to our question of the day –– can chlamydia be dormant and undetected? There are two parts to the answer. First, yes, chlamydia can lie unnoticed for long periods of time. However, even if chlamydia remains asymptomatic, tests can still detect its presence.
It's quite another to learn you have an STI while you're in a monogamous relationship. If you have been totally faithful, you may assume that your partner acquired the infection while being unfaithful. Though it's possible they may have been intimate with someone else, it's also possible they never cheated at all.
Yes! Even if you're in a long-term, monogamous relationship, it's possible for you or your partner to have a previously undiagnosed and untreated STI.
If 2 people who don't have any STDs have sex, it's not possible for either of them to get one. A couple can't create an STD from nothing — they have to get spread from one person to another.
A dormant sexually transmitted disease is a disease or infection that exists within the body without triggering STD symptoms. And while a dormant STD may not display visible signs or cause any discomfort, you can still spread it to your sexual partner or partners.
If left untreated, chlamydia can cause pelvic inflammatory disease in women, which can lead to chronic pain and infertility. In men, untreated chlamydia can cause pain and swelling in one or both testicles. If detected early, chlamydia may be treated with a single dose of antibiotics.
Nope! Chlamydia is easily cured with antibiotics. Chlamydia is a bacterial infection (like strep throat or an ear infection), which means that once you've been treated and tested negative for it (to make sure the antibiotics worked), it's gone.
If untreated, chlamydia can spread into the uterus or fallopian tubes and cause pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), a serious infection of the reproductive organs. PID can cause damage in your fallopian tubes.
Once you are infected, you can infect someone else. Both gonorrhea and chlamydia often have no symptoms. Sometimes only one partner will have symptoms, even though both have the disease. That's why notifying your sexual partners about the results of your test is important.
No, Chlamydia infections will not go away on their own. In some cases, a Chlamydia infection can be fought off by the body's immune system, but these cases are rare and should not influence anyone's decisions to get tested or treated.