ResearchGeneral gynecologyFour subtypes of adenomyosis assessed by magnetic resonance imaging and their specification
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
We investigated 163 patients with adenomyosis who were treated surgically in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Takanohara Central Hospital, Nara, Japan, during the period from April 2007 through to August 2011. The surgery consisted of hysterectomy (n = 40) and adenomyomectomy (n = 123) that were performed laparoscopically in most cases (n = 155; 95.1%). In 11 of the 163 patients, MRI films were not available because they were taken at different institutions and were returned to the
Results
The patients' background aspects, symptoms, MRI findings, surgical findings, and histologic findings are summarized according to the subtypes (Table 1). There were no between-subtype differences in the symptoms; quite a number of other variables show statistical significance.
To find the variables that were responsible for discrimination and specification of the subtypes, stepwise logistic regression analyses were performed. Table 2 depicts the results of the analysis for subtype I as the
Comments
Adenomyosis is defined as a pathologic condition in which endometrial or endometrium-like structures are present and function in the myometrium. It has been accepted for a long period of time that adenomyosis develops as a result of direct invasion of the endometrium into the myometrium. This causes thickening and aberrancy of the junctional zone, which has been the diagnostic criteria of adenomyosis.3 Of course, there are patients who satisfy this criteria (Figure 1, A). However, this is not
Acknowledgment
We thank Dr G. Honjo, Department of Pathology, Tennri Hospital, Tennri, Nara, Japan, for the production of histologic pictures.
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Cited by (0)
The authors report no conflict of interest.
Cite this article as: Kishi Y, Suginami H, Kuramori R, et al. Four subtypes of adenomyosis assessed by magnetic resonance imaging and their specification. Am J Obstet Gynecol 2012;207:114.e1-7.