A group of scientists carried out an experiment to find out if women who had endometriosis also had increased risks of heart disease.
The team analyzed the medical history of 116,430 women. The data was provided by the Nurses’ Health Study II which tracked the participants for 20 years (1989-2009). They focused on three major heart issues including heart attacks, artery complications and chest pain. The paper shows that women who had the uterus disease were more likely to suffer one of the heart illnesses or a combination of all. The information is more alarming for younger women as ladies aged 40 or younger have their risks doubled according to the study.
The cohort is not enough to jump to conclusions
The article specifies that important information was not taken into consideration. The demographic and anthropocentric factors were ignored. The family and reproductive history altogether with the lifestyle were not analyzed, which renders the study as incomplete. It’s normal, though. This is the first study looking for a correlation between uterus inflammation and heart diseases. The group carrying out the study suspect that maybe is not endometriosis itself. One of the treatments for the problem is surgery and previous studies have linked these procedures with an increment in heart complications.
What is endometriosis?
Around 8% of women in the world have this rare problem. Tissue that is meant to grow inside their uterus starts manifesting outside it. Said tissue is also meant to bleed every month when they menstruate. The most common symptom is pelvic pain and in almost half of the cases infertility. Some specialists urge women to visit the doctor if they feel a lot of pain during the period. There are a lot of methods to diagnose the problem, but biopsy stands as the best one. The problem is that in 25% of the cases women feel no extra pain during their menstrual cycle, which makes the study very important because these group of women could be more likely to have a heart disease without even knowing it. There is no cure for the disease, but there are a lot of treatments that can ease the symptoms.
The study was published online on March 29, 2016, on the Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes journal.