The Painful Truth

Living with Endometriosis

By Gwen Morrison

Endometriosis is reported to affect as many as 5.5 million women in the United States and Canada. It is a painful, chronic disease that has no determined cure. The treatment for the disease is only palliative, with ways to suppress the disease and minimize the symptoms associated with it. Endometriosis plagues women of all ages and contributes to various health problems, including painful menstrual cycles, discomfort during intercourse and infertility. Endometriosis can strike a woman before she conceives her first child, when she is pregnant or during subsequent pregnancies.

"Endometriosis is a disease in which tissue called the endometrium normally only within the uterine cavity is found outside the uterine cavity, most often on the peritoneum and sometimes within the ovaries," says Dr. John L. Gililland, physician and director of the Northern California Fertility Medical Center in Roseville, Calif. "We're still not completely certain of its cause, but it appears to have some genetic predisposition."

According to the Endometriosis Association (EA), a nonprofit organization that provides support and information for women with endometriosis, there is a theory involving retrograde menstruation that suggests that some of the menstrual tissue backs up through the fallopian tubes during menstruation, implants in the abdomen and then grows.

"It is interesting that retrograde menstruation has been demonstrated in nearly all women but most do not develop endometriosis," Dr. Gililland says. "Some think that there may be a slight deficit in the immune system that doesn't allow it to 'clean up' the pelvis following menstruation like it should."

Some experts believe there is a hormonal problem that allows the tissue to grow in women who develop endometriosis. Reports by the Endometriosis Association show there is another theory that indicates the endometrial tissue is distributed from the uterus to other parts of the body through the lymph system or through the blood system.

Want to see more?

• When Life Is a Pain: The Facts on Endometriosis
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