One in 10 women live with endometriosis worldwide, but it often takes years for women to receive a diagnosis.
"Unfortunately, a lot of the times, women are told, 'Oh, it's just menstrual pain. Just take a couple of Tylenol and you'll be okay,'" said Dr. Julie Kim, Professor of OB-GYN at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
Endometriosis is a chronic disease that can cause debilitating pain, heavy bleeding and infertility. So, Dr. Kim said often, women are living with this pain for years before they receive a diagnosis.
"Unfortunately, right now, to really diagnose endometriosis would be surgery. So, this is a very long process," Dr. Kim said.
That's why she said there needs to be more funding for endometriosis research. That's something she's working on, thanks to a $100,000 grant from Friends of Prentice to further research endometriosis at Northwestern Medicine Prentice Women’s Hospital.
Dr. Kim said the work she is doing involves using actual patient cells.
"In this case, we take blood from patients and then we turn those cells into stem cells, and using stem cell technology, we are able to study endometriosis outside of a woman's body in the lab," she said.
This allows researchers to essentially recreate endometriosis and study what inflames it.
"We can eventually study what drugs can be used to treat it," she said. "We want to provide information of how endometriosis works, so that we can identify new types of treatments, so that we can finally eradicate this disease, as well as find out ways that we can detect this disease earlier."
She said she wants to see more funding for women's health across the board so that women won't have to undergo invasive procedures or live so much of their lives in pain.
"It's amazing to me that these diseases have been around since women have been around, and yet, the treatment for women is surgery, and surgery doesn't always help either," she said.
She said she thinks funding and priorities are elsewhere. She said diseases like cancer, for example, have had significantly more funding and are now no longer necessarily a "death sentence" once diagnosed.
She said this is evidence that with sufficient research, we can come to a solution.
"If we were to invest enough in women's health research, so much can be researched, and so much can be discovered towards the benefit of women," she said. "This is not a disease that's going away, and we need to tackle it right now."
As for endometriosis symptoms, Dr. Kim said they will often mirror those of menstrual pain. This includes severe cramps, pain during or after sex and heavy or irregular bleeding. These symptoms often worsen during the menstrual cycle.
Dr. Kim said if the pain does not subside with a normal dosage of ibuprofen, women may want to consider seeing a doctor.
"Women should not just sit there and take it. There are solutions," she said. "So go advocate for yourself. Go find doctor that is willing to really take a look at the symptoms seriously and go to the people that specialize in these conditions as well."