Treatment
Upon diagnosis, estrogen and progesterone therapy is typically commenced, prompting the development of female characteristics.
The consequences of streak gonads to a person with Swyer syndrome:
- Gonads cannot make estrogen, so the breasts will not develop and the uterus will not grow and menstruate until estrogen is administered. This is often given transdermally.
- Gonads cannot make progesterone, so menstrual periods will not be predictable until progestin is administered, still usually as a pill.
- Gonads cannot produce eggs so conceiving children naturally is not possible. A woman with a uterus but no ovaries may be able to become pregnant by implantation of another woman's fertilized egg (embryo transfer).
- Streak gonads with Y chromosome-containing cells have a high likelihood of developing cancer, especially gonadoblastoma. Streak gonads are usually removed within a year or so of diagnosis since the cancer can begin during infancy.
Read more about this topic: XY Gonadal Dysgenesis
Famous quotes containing the word treatment:
“I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts.... The question “Why did you start using narcotics in the first place?” should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Judge Ginsburg’s selection should be a model—chosen on merit and not ideology, despite some naysaying, with little advance publicity. Her treatment could begin to overturn a terrible precedent: that is, that the most terrifying sentence among the accomplished in America has become, “Honey—the White House is on the phone.””
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)