A gonadotrophin-releasing hormone agonist compared with expectant management after conservative surgery for symptomatic endometriosis

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Goserelin in the context of endometriosis, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Pregnancy rates and time to conception in women wanting children were also evaluated.

Why It Was Studied

A total of 269 women undergoing conservative surgery for mild to severe symptomatic endometriosis.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 269 women taking part.

PubMed tags the participants as women only.

Nineteen Italian academic departments and teaching hospitals specialising in reparative and reconstructive surgery.

After surgery the women were assigned to treatment with subcutaneous goserelin depot injections for six months or to expectant management.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and multicenter study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Goserelin and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Running at several centres spread the Goserelin study over different clinics and patient groups.

The methods mention a period of six months.

A multicentre, prospective, randomised controlled study.

Dysmenorrhoea, deep dyspareunia, nonmenstrual pain and general discomfort were graded according to a verbal rating scale from 0 (absent) to 3 (severe) and the scores summed to give a total symptoms score.

Only patients with at least one preoperative moderate or severe symptom were enrolled.

The women were evaluated regularly for two years.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Endometriosis, Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone, Goserelin, Postoperative Pain, Pelvic Pain, Postoperative Care and Recurrence.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and multicenter study of Goserelin in 269 women in people with endometriosis over six months.

Results are reported in around 6 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 1999 (British journal of obstetrics and gynaecology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Goserelin compound page, Endometriosis research.