Submucous fibroids: presurgical classification to evaluate the viability of hysteroscopic surgical treatment - Revista Brasileira de Ginecologia e Obstetrícia

OBJECTIVE: to develop a new preoperative classification of submucous myomas to evaluate the viability and the degree of difficulty of hysteroscopic myomectomy. METHODS: forty-four patients were submitted to hysteroscopic resection of submucous myomas. The possibility of total resection of the myoma, the surgery duration, the fluid deficit, and the incidence of complications were evaluated. The myomas were classified by the Classification of the European Society of Endoscopic Surgery (CESES) and by the classification proposed (CP) by our group, that besides the degree of penetration of the myoma in the myometrium, adds the parameters: extent of the base of the myoma as related to the uterine wall, the size of the myoma in centimeters and its topography at the uterine cavity. For statistical analysis the Fisher test, the Student t test and the analysis of variance were used. Statistic significance was considered when the p-value was smaller than 0.05 in the bicaudal test. RESULTS: in 47 myomas the hysteroscopic surgery was considered complete. There was no significant difference among the three levels (0, 1 and 2) by CESES. By CP, the difference among the number of complete surgeries was significant (p=0.001) between the two levels (groups I and II). The difference between the surgery duration was significant when the two classifications were compared. In relation to the fluid deficit, just CP presented significant differences among the levels (p=0,02). CONCLUSIONS: the proposed classification includes more clues about the difficulties of the hysteroscopic myomectomy than the standard classification. It should be noted that the number of hysteroscopic myomectomies used for that analysis was modest, being interesting to evaluate the performance of the proposed classification in larger series of cases.