Endometriosis is reported to affect as many as 5.5 million women in the United States and Canada. It is a painful, chronic disease that has no determined cure. The treatment for the disease is only palliative, with ways to suppress the disease and minimize the symptoms associated with it. Endometriosis plagues women of all ages and contributes to various health problems, including painful menstrual cycles, discomfort during intercourse and infertility. Endometriosis can strike a woman before she conceives her first child, when she is pregnant or during subsequent pregnancies.

"Endometriosis is a disease in which tissue called the endometrium – normally only within the uterine cavity – is found outside the uterine cavity, most often on the peritoneum and sometimes within the ovaries," says Dr. John L. Gililland, physician and director of the Northern California Fertility Medical Center in Roseville, Calif. "We're still not completely certain of its cause, but it appears to have some genetic predisposition."

According to the Endometriosis Association (EA), a nonprofit organization that provides support and information for women with endometriosis, there is a theory involving retrograde menstruation that suggests that some of the menstrual tissue backs up through the fallopian tubes during menstruation, implants in the abdomen and then grows.

"It is interesting that retrograde menstruation has been demonstrated in nearly all women but most do not develop endometriosis," Dr. Gililland says. "Some think that there may be a slight deficit in the immune system that doesn't allow it to 'clean up' the pelvis following menstruation like it should."

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