Analysis of sterilization failure in Brazil.

A study of 13,423 female sterilization procedures performed from 1981 to 1984 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, was conducted to determine the level of sterilization failure. The lifetable cumulative failure rate was 0.54 at 12 months per 100 initial sterilizations, increasing to 1.04 at 48 months. Results of a multivariate analysis indicated that the differential in the rate of sterilization failure by woman's age at sterilization at 12 and 24 months was statistically highly significant. However, the differential rate of failure by the other variables such as whether sterilized during a training period, number of sterilizations per surgeon per day, and year of sterilization were not statistically significant.