It is estimated that around 30–40% of patients with the condition will experience infertility. In Spain, more than one million women are affected.
The debilitating pain began when she was just 11 years old. ‘It started with my first period,’ recounts Calíope Campo, 29. That day she was supposed to go on a school field trip, but instead she stayed in bed, unable to get up, crying nonstop. When her mother took her to the emergency room, the doctors’ response was the same that thousands of girls and women have heard for years: that it was a ‘period pain’ and that it was normal. She was given an anti-inflammatory and sent home. The diagnosis of endometriosis would not come until 2024, 15 years later, when she tried to become pregnant.
It is estimated that this chronic inflammatory condition — in which tissue similar to the endometrium grows outside the uterus — affects around 10% of women of reproductive age. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), this amounts to approximately 190 million women worldwide. In Spain, various estimates place the figure above one million. Its prevalence is comparable to other well-known chronic diseases such as diabetes or hypertension, although its social and healthcare impact remains far less visible.
Symptoms
Early diagnosis of endometriosis is key to slowing its progression and improving the quality of life of those who suffer from it. The most common symptoms include chronic pelvic pain, discomfort during sexual intercourse, and pain when urinating or having a bowel movement. Patients may also experience extreme fatigue, migraines, lower back pain, abdominal bloating, nausea, intestinal disorders, and difficulty eating or digesting. It can also have profound consequences for the affected person’s reproductive health.
New Techniques
Fertility preservation has increasingly become a standard recommendation in the management of this condition. In the field of surgical treatment, specialists have also begun to favor more conservative approaches. A study led by Dexeus Mujer compared conventional cystectomy — surgery involving removal of the ovarian cyst along with part of the healthy ovarian tissue — with plasma energy ablation, a less invasive technique that eliminates the affected tissue while minimizing damage to the healthy ovary.
Results published in Reproductive Biomedicine Online showed significantly greater preservation of ovarian reserve with plasma energy, a determining factor for future fertility.
Advances in Research
One of the major challenges is advancing diagnostic methods, which currently rely on clinical suspicion and imaging tests (ultrasound and MRI). One of the main lines of research is the search for non-invasive or minimally invasive biomarkers that could improve the diagnosis and monitoring of the disease. An increasing number of research groups are analyzing different types of biological samples, such as blood, saliva, urine, vaginal fluid, and even menstrual blood.
Researcher Analuce Canha Gouveia and the Gynetools team are developing a minimally invasive device called Dufic, designed to collect uterine fluid and obtain samples from the endometrial microenvironment without resorting to procedures such as biopsy, which can be painful and carry risks.
Regarding treatment, there is currently no drug that provides a locally targeted and fully effective response to eradicate the pain. This is largely due to the limitations of current rodent-based study models, which do not faithfully reproduce what occurs in human endometriosis. The Incliva team has developed new experiments based on generating endometrial tissue in rodents to accelerate the arrival of new therapies.
Source: ELPAIS.COM
