Progesterone for premenstrual syndrome

Table 1. Summary of methodological quality

Table 1. Summary of methodological quality

Table 2. Interventions

trial	route	vehicle	dose in mg	frequency	beginning	ending	treatment free days	cycles
Magill 1995	vaginal or rectal	Suppocire (a mixture of mono, di and tri‐glycerides and polyoxyethylene glyceride)	400	twice a day	14 days before next expected menses	menses	none	4 either placebo or progesterone in parallel design
Vanselow 1996	vaginal and oral	arachis oil in soft gelatine capsules	oral 100 2 x 100 vaginal 2 x 100	each morning and each night at night	3 days after ovulation	not reported	not recorded	1,2 oral progesterone with vaginal placebo or oral placebo with vaginal progesterone or vaginal and oral placebos 3,4 different combination 5,6 remaining combination

Table 2. Interventions

Table 3. The nature of primary outcomes in included studies

Trial	Scales used	When applied	By whom	Number of items	Degrees of severity	Data Used	Statistic	Significance tests	Comments
Magill 1995	Diary cards	daily	participants	symptoms selected by participants	4 point scale	baseline score ie mean of eligible symptoms' scores reductions in baseline scores for each cycle in each group	medians and interquartiles of baseline scores for each group medians and interquartiles of reductions in baseline scores for each cycle of each group	Wilcoxon rank sum test	unsuitable treatment of ordinal data
Vaneslow 1996 1	Menstrual Distress Questionnaire MDQ	on day 26	trialists	47 in eight groups	6 point scale	sum of scores for second month	means and SDs	ANOVA with Bonferroni correction Fisher's Planned Least Significant Difference	unsuitable treatment of ordinal data SDs larger than means
2	Beck Depression Inventory BDI	on day 26	trialists	21	4 point scale	sum of scores for second month	means and SDs		unsuitable treatment of ordinal data
3	Spielberger STAI	on day 26	trialists	40	4	sum of scores for second month	means and SDs		unsuitable treatment of ordinal data

Table 3. The nature of primary outcomes in included studies

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