[Babase] reproductive tables
Susan Alberts
alberts at duke.edu
Sat Dec 3 13:49:23 EST 2005
Jeanne,
A question has come up. How important is it to include Bdates into
babase (Bdates dates on which a female bleeds vaginally but the
bleeding is not considerated menstruation and not associated with a
birth or fetal loss)?
We have already spent a fair amount of time trying to accomodate
Bdates and they have resulted in modification of the reproductive
tables as you've seen (all we did was added these Bdates and said,
"how are we going to put them into the cycles tables?") There are
three options for going on:
1. Keep things as Karl has currently proposed to program them. The
way Bdates are incorporated now may sometimes be somewhat confusing
but overall the system works well.
2. Continue to work on making the system simpler and clearer and
still incorporate Bdates.
3. Decide that Bdates are not important to us and decide NOT to enter
them in the system.
My problem with option 2 is that my impression is that Bdates are
rare and that we don't really have that many questions about them. We
can invest a large amount of time and money solving a problem that
isn't really a problem. So here are the possible bleeding events for
which (a) it is not obvious which cycle it belongs to, (b) we might
want to take account of but that, without Karl's current scheme, we
have no way of entering into the database without considerably:
1. bleeding during pregnancy
2. bleeding during lactation (when the female is amennhoric)
3. bleeding before menarche
4. bleeding that occurs immediately after resumption of observation,
and we have no other records of the cycle to which it belongs
Any others?
What are your thoughts about this?
Karl notes that we can proceed for now by not allowing the system to
accomodate Bdates (pursuing option 3). We can always go back to this
later and incorporate after we have a chance to sit down and talk.
For my part, I am not sure how common any of the bleeding events
described above actually are and how important it is for us to record
them so I am inclined to go with this for now.
Susan
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Susan Alberts, Associate Professor
Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, Durham NC 27708
phone 919-660-7272 fax 919-660-7293
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