Continuous versus cyclic oral contraceptives for the treatment of endometriosis: a systematic review

Konstantinos A Zorbas, Konstantinos P Economopoulos, Nikolaos Vlahos, Nikos F Vlahos
Archives of gynecology and obstetrics · 2015 · vol. 292(1) , pp. 37–43 · doi:10.1007/s00404-015-3641-1 · PMID:25644508 · W1971961099
review OA: closed CC0 ⤵ 57 in-corpus citations
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⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06+body, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

Continuous oral contraceptive use after endometriosis surgery reduced dysmenorrhea recurrence, delayed pain onset, lessened pelvic pain, and decreased endometrioma recurrence compared to cyclic use.

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⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This systematic review examined whether continuous versus cyclic combined oral contraceptive regimens after conservative surgery reduce symptom recurrence and improve patient compliance in women with endometriosis, using a Medline search to identify four eligible studies with at least 6 months of treatment and 12 months of follow-up. The authors’ cumulative, descriptive analysis found that postoperative continuous oral contraceptives were associated with lower dysmenorrhea recurrence, delayed return of dysmenorrhea, reduced nonspecific pelvic pain, and reduced endometrioma recurrence. The major limitation stated by the authors is that only four studies met strict inclusion criteria and the review used a purely descriptive approach rather than inferential analysis. This paper is centrally about endometriosis — it systematically compares continuous versus cyclic postoperative oral contraceptive regimens to reduce endometriosis symptom and lesion recurrence.

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Condition tags

dysmenorrheaendometriosischronic_pelvic_pain

MeSH descriptors

Contraceptives, Oral Contraceptives, Oral, Combined Endometriosis Contraceptives, Oral Contraceptives, Oral Contraceptives, Oral, Combined Contraceptives, Oral, Combined Dysmenorrhea Dysmenorrhea Dysmenorrhea Endometriosis Endometriosis Female Humans Pelvic Pain Pelvic Pain Pelvic Pain Postoperative Period Recurrence

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References (30)

Cited by (50)

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-06-12T06:13:51.797165+00:00
openalex
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License: CC0 · commercial use OK