Endometriosis can have a profound impact on women’s lives, including associated pain, infertility, decreased quality of life, and interference with daily life, relationships, and livelihood.
So often we get questions in our Facebook group about diagnostic studies for endometriosis. Patients are told repeatedly, your MRI/CT Scan/US/colonoscopy showed nothing, so you are disease free. This makes the path to diagnosis long and difficult for the patient. Since classic endometriosis symptoms are so pervasive and painful, these women persist in seeking answers. Still, on average, it takes 9 years to get a diagnosis.
While several companies are working to develop one, there is no single blood test that can definitively diagnose endometriosis yet. It takes a long time to determine if a test has the reliability “so that no patients with actual endometriosis would be missed and no women without endometriosis would be selected for potentially unnecessary additional procedures
Surgery is the only method for definitive diagnosis of endometriosis; however, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI’s) can be used for preoperative planning as well as ruling out other related conditions. It is important to have a team who knows the correct protocol for imaging and for reading the images.
While endometriosis cannot be conclusively diagnosed using ultrasound, it can be useful in ruling in/out other conditions and giving clinical data before further treatment.
While a working diagnosis of endometriosis might be made from symptoms or other tests, a definitive diagnosis is only made by surgery with biopsy. It is important for your surgeon to have knowledge about all the different appearances of endometriosis as well as all the different areas it can be found