What Is Endometriosis And How Does It Affect Fertility?

Dr Liyun Li

Are you have trouble conceiving but don’t know why? Do you experience pain each month during menstruation? The problem might be Endometriosis. You have probably heard of Endometriosis … but what is it, and how does it affect your fertility. To explain Endometriosis and answer these questions is Dr Liyun Li of the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco.

To best explain Endometriosis let’s first do a review of our reproductive system. The uterus, as we all know, is a muscular sac that the fetus is housed in during pregnancy. The lining of the uterus, inside the uterine wall, is where the fetus implants. Now every month, after puberty, women ovulate one egg, and that egg can get get fertilized and become an embryo, which then implants in the lining within the uterus. This lining is called the Endometrium. At the end of a cycle, when a pregnancy doesn’t always occur, this lining then sheds in the form of our menstrual flow.

What Endometriosis is, is when this Endometriotic tissue actually grows somewhere else, in addition to inside the uterus. So, it can grow in the pelvis, on the outside of the uterus. It can grow in our Fallopian tubes. It can grow on the surface of the ovaries. In rare cases it can grow on the surface of our intestines, on our bladder. And in very care cases ectopic Endometrial tissue has been found in very distant organs like the lung, and even the brain.

So that is the condition, Endometriosis is the condition where Endometrial tissue is found outside of the uterus.

The basic problem with this condition is that this tissue responds to hormones. Most specifically I’m talking about estrogen and progesterone, those hormones are important in orchestrating ovulation and pregnancy. So every month, estrogen stimulates the lining of the uterus to grow. This is normal Read more…