Combined surgical and hormone therapy for endometriosis is the most effective treatment: prospective, randomized, controlled trial

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Leuprolide in the context of endometriosis.

To evaluate 3 therapy strategies: hormone therapy, surgery, and combined treatment.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as teenagers and adults, women only.

Four hundred fifty patients with genital endometriosis, aged 18 to 44 years, before first laparoscopy.

Patients were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 treatment groups: hormone therapy, surgery, or combined treatment.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

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

The timeline in the abstract includes 3 months.

Prospective, randomized, controlled study (Canadian Task Force classification I).

Patients were reevaluated at second-look laparoscopy, at 2 to 2 months after 3-month hormone therapy in groups 1 and 3 and at 5 to 6 months in group 2 (surgical treatment alone).

Outcome data were focussed on the endometriosis stage, recurrence of symptoms, and pregnancy rate.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Combined Modality Therapy, Endometriosis, Fertility Agents, Female, Genital Diseases, Female, Laparoscopy and Leuprolide.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Combined treatment, Hormone therapy, Infertility, Prospective studies, Recurrence and Reoperation.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Leuprolide in people with endometriosis over 3 months.

Its findings take up roughly 7 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2013 (Journal of minimally invasive gynecology), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Leuprolide compound page, Endometriosis research.