Women who favour tight jeans or remove pubic hair from their mons pubis may be doubling their risk of vulvodynia, US research suggests.

After adjusting for confounding factors, young women who struggle into skin-fitting jeans or pants at least four times a week have twice the odds of vulvodynia than those who never wear fitted pants, the Boston University School of Health researchers have found.

And women who opt for the “Brazilian-style” of hair removal — where pubic hair is removed from the mons pubis — were 74% more likely to have the vulval condition than those who restricted hair removal to the bikini area, they report in the Journal of Lower Genital Tract Disease.

Further, those who remove hair from the mons pubis weekly or more were nearly two times more likely to have vulvodynia than those who remove hair from their bikini areas less than once a month.