Pain triggered in this way can last throughout the menstrual cycle, not just during menstrual periods.Also, endometriotic lesions can develop their own nerve supply, thereby creating a direct and two-way interaction between lesions and the central nervous system, potentially producing a variety of individual differences in pain that can, in some cases, become independent of the disease itself. Nerve fibres and blood vessels are thought to grow into endometriosis lesions by a process known as neuroangiogenesis. Infertility
About a third of women with infertility have endometriosis. Among those with endometriosis, about 40% are infertile. The pathogenesis of infertility is dependent on the stage of disease: in early stage disease, it is hypothesised that this is secondary to an inflammatory response that impairs various aspects of conception, whereas in later stage disease distorted pelvic anatomy and adhesions contribute to impaired fertilisation. Other
Other symptoms include diarrhea or constipation, chronic fatigue, nausea and vomiting, migraines, low-grade fevers, heavy (44%) and/or irregular periods (60%), and hypoglycemia. There is an association between endometriosis and certain types of cancers, notably some types of ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma and brain cancer. Endometriosis is unrelated to endometrial cancer. Rarely, endometriosis can cause endometrium-like tissue to be found in other parts of the body. Thoracic endometriosis occurs when endometrium-like tissue implants in the lungs or pleura. Manifestations of this include coughing up blood, a collapsed lung, or bleeding into the pleural space.Stress may be a cause or a consequence of endometriosis.
Mutation rates strongly increase in cells defective in DNA mismatch repair or in homologous recombinational repair (HRR).During repair of DNA double strand breaks, or repair of other DNA damages, incompletely cleared sites of repair can cause epigenetic gene silencing. DNA repair deficiencies (level 4 in the figure) cause increased DNA damages (level 5 in the figure) which result in increased somatic mutations and epigenetic alterations (level 6 in the figure). Field defects, normal appearing tissue with multiple alterations (and discussed in the section below), are common precursors to development of the disordered and improperly proliferating clone of tissue in a malignant neoplasm. Such field defects (second level from bottom of figure) may have multiple mutations and epigenetic alterations. Once a cancer is formed, it usually has genome instability. This instability is likely due to reduced DNA repair or excessive DNA damage. Because of such instability, the cancer continues to evolve and to produce sub clones. For example, a renal cancer, sampled in 9 areas, had 40 ubiquitous mutations, demonstrating tumor heterogeneity (i.e. present in all areas of the cancer), 59 mutations shared by some (but not all areas), and 29 “private” mutations only present in one of the areas of the cancer. Field defects
Various other terms have been used to describe this phenomenon, including "field effect", "field cancerization", and "field carcinogenesis".