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- Published on: 10 December 2020
- Published on: 10 December 2020Food for thought in PID treatment
The study by Dean et al. (1) on the treatment of PID was complicated and thought-provoking. Could it be that "mild" PID comprised many cases that were not PID at all? This issue bedevilled studies in the past, so why not here? Am I right in thinking that randomisation was used to try to maintain an evenness of disease severity between the two treatment arms, that is standard (SoC) with ofloxacin plus metronidazole, and an intervention arm (IA) with intramuscular ceftriaxone plus azithromycin and metronidazole? This is an important point when the outcome of each arm is to be compared. Presumably, after diagnosis treatment began without delay, not waiting for the results of microbiological tests which, in fact, showed M.genitalium in about 10% of cases in each arm, a proporttion seen by others (3) in acute PID. Standard treatment was judged to be slightly superior to the alternative treatment. Tests of microbiological cure 6 to 8 weeks after the study started showed a few azithromycin- resistant cases of M.genitalium, roughly comparable in the two arms. Not being aware of this at the start of treatment seems excusable. The reader must also realize that it was a situation experienced up to 9 years ago before an abrupt termination of the study. Today the scene is different, resistance of M.genitalium to azithromycin and other antibiotics being common (4). It has become clear that M.genitalium should be sought early followed rapidly by treatment guided by nothing othe...
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None declared.