Hope for Suffering Women: Breakthrough in Endometriosis Research

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Imagine feeling like knives are spinning in your stomach every month. for days. Six to ten out of a hundred Swiss women each month experience varying degrees of pain. Endometriosis is the name of an often extremely painful disease in which tissue resembling the wall of the uterus grows, so to speak, outside the uterus in the pelvic region, into the intestines or lungs.

The tissue causes inflammation, so nerves often ache in such places. As with the normal lining of the uterus, it is tied to the menstrual cycle – especially menstrual bleeding can be almost unbearably painful. The tissue can also scar and cause not only more chronic pain, but pain that can even lead to infertility.

Australian researchers at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Sydney have now made an important breakthrough: they have been able to grow all known endometriosis tissue types – there are quite a few – in the lab. “This,” says research director Jason Abbott, “is the first step towards a targeted, differentiated, and therefore more effective treatment.” This is because different types of tissue respond differently to different forms of treatment and different medications.

For a long time women hardly appeared in medicine.

Research on this chronic disease has long been neglected. The reason is, as experts have confirmed: Endometriosis doesn’t kill, you “just” have pain for life. And “only” women suffer from endometriosis – and this has proven to be long overlooked in classical medicine. Until recently, nearly all drug testing was done almost exclusively on young white men.

In an international comparison, Switzerland also lags behind. Michael Müller, chief gynecologist at SRF at Inselspital Bern, says there has been a long-standing lack of political will to allocate funds for women-specific medical research, as there are more female politicians in Switzerland lately.

But something is happening (very) slowly. Even in Switzerland.

Even if Switzerland lags far behind in the international arena, something is still going on: “In March 2023, the Council of States passed a proposal from the Health Commission and referred it to the Federal Council so that the Federal Council finally had the mandate to have women-specific disease symptoms are investigated more specifically,” says Müller. This is the only way to ensure quality in the treatment of these diseases.

Source : Blick