The pathologists are free to go, or are they?

摘要

The publication in this month's Fertility and Sterility entitled "The Accuracy and Reproducibility of the Endometrial Receptivity Array Is Superior to Histology as a Diagnotic Method for Endometrial Receptivity (1) provides further evidence for the problems with endometrial dating and the lack of meaningful use that this age-old technique provides. The original paper by Noyes et al. (2) has been one of the most cited reference in the gynecologic literature, providing a defined set of criteria for assigning endometrial biopsies to a specific time in the menstrual cycle. Georgianna Seeger Jones later used these criteria to help understand infertility and developed de novo the concept of luteal phase defect. Owing to the subjectivity and inter- and intraobserver variability, alternative biomarkers have long been sought. As referenced in this publication, the use of dating criteria when critically examined provide little if any benefit for the assessment of infertility, and the criteria themselves appear to have much more variability than first thought.