Assuntos
Anormalidades Induzidas por Medicamentos/etiologia , Efeitos Colaterais e Reações Adversas Relacionados a Medicamentos , Feto/efeitos dos fármacos , Complicações na Gravidez/tratamento farmacológico , Adulto , Etanol/efeitos adversos , Feminino , Idade Gestacional , Humanos , Nicotina/efeitos adversos , GravidezRESUMO
OBJECTIVE: This study evaluated the reproducibility of a questionnaire concerned with the clinical and epidemiological aspects of menopause. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The study population consisted of a hundred perimenopausal Mexican women seeking care at gynecology and obstetric health care services. Their participation was voluntary and they answered the same questionnaire two times with a 15-30 day lag between each application. RESULTS: The Kappa coefficient was high (0.81-1.0) for categorical variables such as: type of menstrual cycles, type of menopause, breast-feeding, use of estrogen during menopause and use of hormonal contraceptives. The Kappa coefficient was moderate (0.7-0.8) for symptoms related to menopause such as hot flashes, sweating, painful coitus, vaginal dryness and a decrease in libido. Mean differences were calculated for continuous variables such as age at menarche, age at menopause, time using estrogen and the duration of breast-feeding, the majority had a value of zero and 95% confidence intervals for these mean differences included the null value. The questionnaire also included other characteristics such as tobacco consumption and a short food frequency questionnaire, which showed high concordance (Kappa 0.7-1.0). CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study show that this questionnaire has a high level of reproducibility and can be useful as a research tool to explore menopause in Mexican women.
Assuntos
Climatério , Inquéritos e Questionários , Feminino , Humanos , Reprodutibilidade dos TestesRESUMO
It has been long established that contraceptive steroid mixtures are highly effective due to the fact that they act simultaneously upon different levels of the pituitary-ovarian-genital tract axis. We hypothesized that the mixture of 30 mcg of ethynylestradiol plus 75 mcg of gestodene might be effective partly through the changes it induces in the histology and histochemistry of the endometrium. To test this hypothesis, 32 healthy patients willing to participate, aged 23 to 34 years, were treated with the above mentioned combination of steroids from day 1 through day 21 of the cycle for six consecutive cycles. They were previously proven to be fertile and ovulatory. In ten of them, selected at random, an endometrial biopsy was taken on the cycle previous to therapy and upon completion of the steroid treatment, for comparison. Tissues were processed for histologic evaluation with hematoxylin-eosin and with acridine orange for the histochemical demonstration of glycogen and ribonucleic acid under fluorescence microscopy. All pre-treatment endometria showed normal findings for ovulatory cycles, while the post-treatment tissues were typical of the steroid-treated endometria, i.e., they had a disrupted balance between glandular and stromal maturation, plus a diminished and abnormally distributed glycogen and ribonucleic acid. We conclude that the established working hypothesis was confirmed.