Oral Contraceptive Therapy for Differentiating Ovarian Cysts

“Watchful waiting” to see whether an ovarian cyst in a woman of reproductive age will regress or disappear is perturbing to both patient and physician. Delay in differentiating between a functional and a nonfunctional cyst may be avoided if the physician remembers the pituitary-ovarian relationships in patients receiving an oral contraceptive agent. When a patient is not taking a contraceptive, estrogen-progestogen therapy can be used in an attempt to cause regression of the cyst.     

New Drugs and Instruments

Information published in this department has been supplied by the manufacturers of the products described.     

Differences in genomic architecture between two distinct geographical strains of the blood fluke Schistosoma japonicum reveal potential phenotype basis

The Chinese (SjC) and Philippine (SjP) strains of the blood fluke Schistosoma japonicum have been shown to present clearly different phenotypes in fecundity, pathology, drug sensitivity and immunology. We used microarray based comparative genomic hybridisation (aCGH) to investigate structural differences in the genomes of the two strains and identified seven distinct regions of the S. japonicum genome that present differential aCGH representing either deletion or duplication regions in SjP. Within these regions, genes predicted to be associated with the recognised phenotypic differences were identified and that may provide new insights into the biology and evolution of the two strains, with implications for the epidemiology and control of schistosomiasis japonica in China and the Philippines.