Researchers have found germs in the tissue of affected women that could trigger the painful abdominal disease. If the suspicion is confirmed, antibiotics would be a treatment option.
Like many women’s diseases, endometriosis is poorly understood: it is still unclear what causes the painful abdominal condition, in which tissue that normally lines the uterine cavity also develops in the ovaries and elsewhere outside the uterus. But researchers from Japan may now have found a trigger: an infection with bacteria. The team from Nagoya University examined the endometrium of 155 women. As it says in the journal Science Translational Medicine reportedfusobacteria were found in 64 percent of patients with endometriosis, while such bacteria were found in only 10 percent of samples from women without endometriosis.