Getting Your Tubes Angry
May 1, 2000 (Portland, Ore.) -- When Susan Belcher of Lockport, Ill., had her tubes angry at age 34, she anticipation the action would be simple. She signed a accord anatomy afore the anaplasty and was told by her doctor that she should expect to accept few -- if any -- ancillary effects. However, afterward the surgery, she chock-full accepting her periods. In fact, at the age of 36, she was diagnosed as postmenopausal. Belcher's doctor says she'll charge to be on hormone replacement therapy for the blow of her life. "If anyone had told me that the surgery could actualize a hormone imbalance, I never would accept done it," she says.
In the United States, about 10 actor women accept had their tubes angry -- a procedure alleged tubal articulation -- as a abiding anatomy of bearing ascendancy since the 1960s, according to the Centers for Disease Ascendancy and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics. This makes it the additional a lot of popular method afterwards articulate contraceptives, according to the CDC.
The exact amount of women who, like Belcher, affirmation to accept post-tubal ligation affection -- a ambit of affection including hot flashes, heavier periods, affection swings, depression, anxiety, insomnia, vaginal dryness, mental confusion, and fatigue -- has not been studied, admitting the affection has been a popular affair in Internet babble apartment and abutment groups. On the added hand, many women address no such affection afterwards the surgery.
No Clear Answers
Belcher says her attempt to acquisition an acknowledgment has been difficult because many medical experts say that post-tubal articulation affection does not exist. "It is a medical myth," says Stephen L. Corson, MD, assistant at the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Thomas Jefferson University and Women's Institute in Philadelphia. Corson led a abstraction that compared hormone levels in women who had had tubal articulation against those of women who had not had the surgery. His abstraction showed no cogent aberration in the hormone levels of the two groups, advertence that the ovaries were not damaged by the surgery. Numerous added studies, including one conducted by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine with after-effects appear in the February 1998 affair of the Journal of Fertility and Sterility, aswell appearance no affirmation to abutment the syndrome.
However, allegations that the anaplasty could advance to post-tubal ligation syndrome aboriginal alike in the 1950s. With the addition in the 1970s of laparoscopy (the alleged "belly button surgery"), which was less invasive than antecedent surgeries, added women than anytime afore chose tubal ligation, and letters of postoperative affection increased, says Corson.
A Surprising Possibility
What could be causing the symptoms? According to Corson and added doctors looking into post-tubal articulation "syndrome," it may in fact be a combination of alternate the use of bearing ascendancy pills and age-related factors.