Gonorrheal vaginitis in children treated by diathermy: One- to three-year follow-up

Abstract

Summary 1. Gonococcal vaginitis in children is not a self-limited disease which tends to fade out in a few months, as has been claimed. Statistics quoted from the article in which this statement is made show that over 37 per cent of the patients in that series had the disease for over a year and that one was supposed to have had it for seven years. 2. Theoretically, diathermy has an advantage over locally applied antiseptics in that it raises resistance in the tissues themselves enabling the body to destroy gonococci deep in the tissues. 3. Practically, in actual results, the diathermy patients had consistently negative smears after twenty-nine weeks in the acute series, and these remained negative during a follow-up period which extended in some of the cases to twenty-five months. 4. The average length of treatment required to give consistently negative smears in the chronic cases was a little over four weeks. The longest follow-up in this group was three and one-half years.