Latest Findings in Endometriosis Research

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Dr. Marshall Smith: "Good morning, here we are at the 1999 AAGL meeting in Las Vegas, and we're very honored to have with us Dr. Philippe Koninckx, from Belgium. Today we'd like to have him talk with us a little bit. He's done such extensive work on the endometriotic disease theory, most of you are well aware of some of the papers and the foundation and the work he's done. We're honored to have him, and we'd just like him to kind of update us on the latest findings, and where he is with that theory at this point."

Professor Philippe Koninckx: "That's what we discussed yesterday at the debate about whether endometriosis is a real surgical disease. We started this century with Sampson's theory where really we had menstruation implantation, and then they assume, and as yesterday - assume that you have progression. But nobody ever had any any idea or hint why you have progression in some of the early endometrial fluid, and that became something out of it. What changed their minds is that we saw that we have implantation and remodeling in all women. I think we have a good idea when all sub-adhesions are perfectly normal, this is a normal condition occurring intermittently in all women. And then in some women something happens like a cellular incident, a mutation, or maybe something else, but it's just like any ordinary benign tumor - like a fibroid in the uterus, breast carcinoma, or like a breast fibroma, it's a benign tumor. And in that type of cellular accident you will have something which is aggressive, infiltrating, and you will have end up with deeply progressive infiltrating endometriosis or you will have something which in addition has adhesions. These are the typical endometriosis, or you have something like low visibility, and these are the typical lesions. The very important thing about this theory is that it becomes very easy to explain why you can have so severe lesions in young women. They increase with age, it no longer means that it's a progressive disease, it just means that the older you are the higher the probability you will have a cellular accident. It's easy to incorporate with this thing cells like dioxins and their effect, heredity of the endometriosis, because at that moment each time you have the genome which is involving probability. The third most important thing is that with the endometriotic disease theory it becomes a benign tumor when you take it out completely, it does not come back. If it does come back, it means that the surgery was done incompletely the first time."

Dr. Marshall Smith: "Correct, thank you very much. I think most people, as I mentioned, are aware of all the groundwork and really the change in basic theories about endometriosis that Dr. Koninckx has done. Thank you very much for joining us today."

Professor Philippe Koninckx: "Thank you."