Global Endometrial Ablation for Menorrhagia in Women With Bleeding Disorders
Mennorhagia is defined as heavy menstrual bleeding. Menorrhagia is defined as a loss of blood of more than 80ml, compared with the normal amount of 20 to 60ml. Normal menstrual periods usually last three to seven days and involve a blood loss of about 4 to 12 teaspoonfuls or 20 to 60ml. Some women have heavy periods, termed as menorrhagia. It can sometimes be severe enough to cause anemia. Most of the times, menorrhagia is not a sign of an underlying medical problem. To prevent too much blood loss though especially in women with excessive menstrual bleeding, global endometrial ablation is evaluated as a treatment in this given article.
Global endometrial ablation involves a minimally invasive, outpatient procedure. It involves the surgical destruction of the endometrial tissue of the uterus. Global endometrial ablation technologies use various forms of energy and devices to ablate, or destroy, the tissue lining the uterus. The energy forms include high frequency radio waves, thermal energy, freezing and microwave energy. In some cases, the procedure can be done in as little as five minutes, and the patient can resume normal activities soon after the procedure. The global endometrial ablation procedure is done under local anesthesia. It can be performed with or without sedation.
The article aims to tell of a study that aimed to assess the effectiveness of the global endometrial ablation procedure in the treatment of women with bleeding disorders who presented with menorrhagia. It tells in the article that the methods involved in the investigation included records linkage system was used and with the aid of inspection microscope to construct a retrospective cohort of 41 women with bleeding disorders or coagulopathy. Coagulopathy is a medical term for a defect in the body’s mechanism for blood clotting. This causes bleeding and blood loss in patients. There was also a reference group of 111 randomly selected women without bleeding disorders from a pool of 943 women who underwent global endometrial ablation. The said number also was treated with thermal balloon ablation technology or bipolar radiofrequency ablation technology for menorrhagia. Demographic data including the type of global endometrial ablation therapy and reablation, and hysterectomy data involved in the investigation were extracted from the database.
The results of the study were concisely described in the article. It relates that there was no significant difference in baseline age, parity, body mass index, uterine size, type of global endometrial ablation therapy, or duration of follow up between the groups. It further tells that two women, which comprises 5 percent, in the coagulopathy group had hysterectomy or reablation. The given result was compared with the 8 patients, comprising 7 percent, in the reference group. A Kaplan-Meier plot was used a statistical tool to analyze the results of the study.
The study also included procedural related complications. It tells that complications related to the global endometrial ablation procedure were generally minor and infrequent, showing in 9 of 152 patients, comprising 6 percent. Complications were equally distributed in the coagulopathy group, with 4 patients involved of 41 and reference groups of 6 patients out of 111. The study all in all concludes that the global endometrial ablation procedure is an effective treatment choice for women with coagulopathy presenting with menorrhagia. Read more
