Association between stroke and patients with pelvic inflammatory disease: a nationwide population-based study in Taiwan.

Abstract

The aim of this study is to estimate the risk of stroke in a 3-year period after pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) using a nationwide population-based study. Our study cohort consisted of all patients with a diagnosis of PID (N = 64,515) between 2004 and 2005 with a control cohort (1:2) of age-matched controls (N = 129, 030). Each patient was tracked from hospitalization until the end of 2006. Cox regressions were performed to compute the 3-year stroke-free survival rates after adjusting for possible confounding factors. We found that women with PID were more likely to have strokes than the control population. After adjusting for potential confounding factors, the adjusted hazard ratio of stroke was 1.63 (95% CI, 1.45-1.85) for PID patients as compared to the general population cohort. Sensitivity analysis using a bootstrap approach further ensured the validity of the results of our study. We concluded that patients with PID have an association with stroke. Further research is necessary to investigate the pathophysiology between PID and stroke.