The efficacy and tolerability of Valette®: a postmarketing surveillance study

Objectives and methods A postmarketing survey was carried out to determine the efficacy and tolerability of Valette® (dienogest 2.0 mg and ethinylestradiol 0.03 mg) in routine gynecological practice.Results Valette had excellent contraceptive efficacy (unadjusted Pearl index 0.14), with 11 unplanned pregnancies from a total of 92 146 cycles of exposure, of which at least four were attributable to user failure.Cycle control was good, with spotting and breakthrough bleeding, which affected 5.0% and 3.4% of women, respectively, during the first cycle, becoming less frequent thereafter. Silent menstruation, i.e. the absence of withdrawal bleeding, affected on average 2.0% of women per cycle and 5.9% within the observation period.Valette was well tolerated. The most common adverse drug reactions were mastalgia (1.46% of all users), weight gain (1.11%), headache (0.98%), nausea/vomiting (0.96%), dysmenorrhea (0.35%), decreased libido (0.31%) and depressive moods (0.28%). The dropout rate due to adverse drug reactions was only 3.2%. Only six of the 16267 women reported events which were considered to be serious adverse drug reactions; all recovered with appropriate treatment.Conclusions These results confirm those from previous clinical trials, and demonstrate that Valette is highly effective, very well tolerated and produces excellent cycle control in routine practice.