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The shop windows all over Italy in March are tinged with pink for the Endometriosis Awareness Month, a chronic disease that affects about 3 million women in the country. APE – Endometriosis Project Association, which unites volunteer patients engaged in providing information on the disease, launches an initiative to make the disease known to as many people as possible and to do prevention. Anyone who has a shop can join Aware Showcases, displaying the EPA balloons and information material during the month of March.
Information to know and have an early diagnosis
The goal of this campaign is to draw attention to a disease that is still difficult to diagnose, for which information becomes fundamental to help women who suffer from it, but also friends or family.
“The information material becomes a concrete help for women suffering from endometriosis – she says Jessica Fiorini, Vice President of APE. -. After I was operated on, I thought I was suffering from a rare disease because I had never heard of it and no one among the people I dated knew about it. One day a colleague brought me a leaflet from the Association that she had found in the doctor’s office and from there I checked out, I visited the site and first of all I discovered that I did not suffer from a rare disease, that I was not alone. Hence the desire to volunteer so that endometriosis became less unknown for everyone ”.
“Shops are the soul of cities and towns, we realized this last year when they were closed, in many cases they can also contribute to the spread of good causes like this – he continues -. There are almost three million women who, in Italy, have to deal withuterus that goes “out of place” because they suffer from endometriosis. Or rather, the organ certainly does not move, but more or less large portions of the endometrium, the tissue that covers the organ of the female genital system, develop elsewhere. For example, these can be localized in the last part of the intestine or in the ovaries “.
Unfortunately for these women, it is mostly about young people between 25 and 34 years old, at the beginning the feeling is that of not being believed, so much so that it often takes years to arrive at a diagnosis. The diagnostic delay, perhaps, is linked to the fact that the disease often appears in adolescents, when it is difficult to think of a picture of this type. And the years pass, while the pain becomes stronger and stronger and is not limited only to “those days”, but even far precedes the menstrual loss becomes a sort of completely unwelcome “travel companion” that impacts on life, by eliminating leisure and social moments from the agenda.
Pathology with many faces
Cases of endometriosis are not all the same. Basically they can be recognized two types of disease. Sometimes cysts form inside the ovary, linked to repeated bleeding of the uterine tissue present inside the organ: these can be identified with an ultrasound and are removed with laparoscopic surgery.
More complex is theinfiltrating endometriosis, which often causes more intense pain, tends to invade neighboring organs, that is, the last part of the intestine, the vagina, the bladder and the ureters. In these cases, if surgery is required, it must be performed by specialized teams, given the complexity of the area and the need to adequately “clean” the tissues, paying particular attention to the nerves.
These interventions are therefore particularly complex. Fortunately, the scalpel only comes into play in the most serious cases, that is when drugs are not enough to keep pain under control or when the woman has a high risk of infertility related to the disease. There early diagnosisthen, it is also essential to recognize cases in which the uterine tissue “out of place” begins to invade nearby structures: immediately eliminating any offshoots of the endometrium means preserving the future well-being of the woman. But, as usual, early diagnosis and the consequent taking charge of the situation by the specialist are the most effective weapon to live with the situation.
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