[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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