Technology has changed the way gay men seek sex -- and at the 2019 IDWeek conference in Washington, D.C., a study showed that Grindr users took more sexual risks but were also more open to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to prevent HIV infection.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, Martin Hoenigl, MD, describes his 1,256-man study in San Diego, and suggests that the results prove that Grindr can provide an HIV-testing and PrEP-promoting platform.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

Basically, what we did, I'm from San Diego and what we have in San Diego now for a long time is large, community-based screening programs for HIV. Recently, we also added STI screening there, so it's community-based. It's free of charge for everyone to walk in. What we did in this setting, basically, is we analyzed, because of course technologies are changing how queer people, men who have sex with men, transgender people, find sex partners. More and more people use now these dating apps like Grindr to find sex partners. One thing we thought would be very interesting in our community, which is mostly an MSM community, so the vast majority of our new HIV diagnoses is MSM. It's just to assess more about Grindr use, how this impacts their risk behavior, how this is associated maybe with certain risk patterns and also diagnosing patterns and syndromes with what we find in these people.

Basically what we did is we started in September last year to assess Grindr use. We have a questionnaire. Everybody walks into our community-based testing setting and there's multiple settings around town and then they get first a blood draw. While they wait for the rapid-test results, they get some questionnaires because this is all a research study. We assess via questionnaire better data Grindr uses, and then we also assess, as a secondary objective, how often they use Grindr and also have them look into their iPhones, those who had iPhones with them in terms of how many minutes they used Grindr within the last week. Read more via Medpage