Great article, thank you for writing this. I, like most others, had no idea about endometriosis aside from some vague image of a disease related to the uterus and appreciate the opportunity to learn more about it. I have a question regarding the embryonic rest theory, though. You say that this theory doesn’t account for why 90% of all clinically visible endometriosis lesions still cluster on the pelvic regions/ovaries, why do you think this is the case? Wouldn’t it make sense that if these cells are randomly scattered over the body from embryogenesis that the ones most likely to manifest as endometriosis would be ones concentrated in areas that produce the largest amounts of estrogen?
That, to me, seems to assume that those areas end up with a locally greater estrogen concentration (for all that summarizing a whole family of molecules related primarily by their signalling effects, can even sensibly be summarized by a single “concentration”), which I’m not actually sure is the case.
It seems to make intuitive sense that a chemical would be most concentrated near its site of introduction into the body, but then I can also think of specific counterexamples. Lead, for example, pools in the skeleton, and almost certainly isn’t being (originally) introduced into the body via the skeleton.
Great article, thank you for writing this. I, like most others, had no idea about endometriosis aside from some vague image of a disease related to the uterus and appreciate the opportunity to learn more about it. I have a question regarding the embryonic rest theory, though. You say that this theory doesn’t account for why 90% of all clinically visible endometriosis lesions still cluster on the pelvic regions/ovaries, why do you think this is the case? Wouldn’t it make sense that if these cells are randomly scattered over the body from embryogenesis that the ones most likely to manifest as endometriosis would be ones concentrated in areas that produce the largest amounts of estrogen?
That, to me, seems to assume that those areas end up with a locally greater estrogen concentration (for all that summarizing a whole family of molecules related primarily by their signalling effects, can even sensibly be summarized by a single “concentration”), which I’m not actually sure is the case.
It seems to make intuitive sense that a chemical would be most concentrated near its site of introduction into the body, but then I can also think of specific counterexamples. Lead, for example, pools in the skeleton, and almost certainly isn’t being (originally) introduced into the body via the skeleton.