In November 2018 a 39 year old IVF patient of mine received terrible news that her Non Invasive Prenatal Test at 11 weeks was positive for Trisomy 13. Patau syndrome is associated with severe intellectual disability and a range of physical defects including heart abnormalities, cleft lip, microphthalmia, brain and spinal anomalies. Only 10% or less of such infants survive until the second year of life.  Needless to say many mothers would request a therapeutic abortion when giv...

Menstrual cups are flexible silicone or rubber cups which are applied to the upper vaginal fornices to collect menstrual blood. They are increasingly being used as a more environmentally-friendly alternative to tampons. They are intended for re-use and can last for upwards of 10 years. Whereas the monthly cost of tampons is ~$10  (before the lifting of GST soon) a menstrual cup costs between  $35-50. At a recent tutorial at WSU I found that 50% of the women students preferred...

Introduction Appendicitis most often occurs between the ages of 10 19 years, with an incidence of between 19-28 per 10,000 before the age of 14 years. Less than 7 per 10,000 children present with appendicitis before the age of 4 years & less than 5% of presentations with appendicitis occur before the age of 5 years.  Causation  In tropical climates the cause is often a parasitic worm (pinworm or roundworm) causing obstr...

The advent of the Non Invasive Prenatal Test has been a major advance for the detection of Trisomy 21 (Down s.), Trisomy 18 (Edwards s.) & Trisomy 13 (Patau s.) and reduces the need for invasive tests which have up to a 3% risk of miscarriage. There has been a subsequent tendency to abandon the previous nuchal translucency ultrasound and biochemical test because of the increased accuracy of detection of the trisomies with the NIPT test which can detect 99% of Down syndrome fetuses ...

The recent Federal Government decision to rebate cervical cancer screening only every 5 years and to only rebate for screening after the age of 24 years and under the age of 74 years raises the question as to whether other aspects of women's health could be also screened far less frequently. That could be an unintended negative consequence of the recent Government funding decision.  The chance of an Australian woman being diagnosed with a gynaecological cancer by age 85 is 1:5...