|
You see the same kind of thing
with black women, though it’s much closer. Part of the issue is that the women that
we’re studying are very unlike the general population. They are very low socio-economic
status women, with probably very different lifestyles, different use of contraception,
frequency of sexual intercourse, and so on. I think the black rates tell us a much more
cleaner story because unfortunately, as you know, in the U.S. black populations tend to be
lower socio-economic status – there’s not a lot of economic variability. However, the
PEACH rates are certainly not lower even just amongst black women or when age-stratitifed
than the U.S. rates. So when we saw that women with endometritis were not very different
than women without it, there were two conclusions that immediately came to mind. One is
that among women who have symptoms of PID, there is no difference between women who do or
do not have endometritis. Our data actually suggest, to the degree that we can suggest
anything based on this fairly bad comparison group, that these women are not really in bad
shape. What that may actually suggest is that antibiotics work, whether they’re given on
an inpatient or outpatient basis. Current antibiotics with reasonably spectrum actually do
fairly well in treating this condition. So while there is data that shows how awful the
disease is, those data all come from a study that was done 30 years ago in Sweden when
antibiotics were very different. Now we have these data from the U.S. that suggest it
might now be a different case. |