The Significance of Diagnostic Delay in Endometriosis

Adi Y. Weintraub
In: Women's Health · 2016 · vol. 2(1) · doi:10.15406/mojwh.2016.02.00018 · W2578578321
article OA: bronze CC0 ⤵ 4 in-corpus citations
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⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06+body, 2026-06-08 ⓘ

Diagnostic delay in endometriosis results from patient factors, physician factors, disease factors, and a lack of comprehensive clinical guidelines.

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⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-09 ⓘ

This editorial discusses the significance of diagnostic delay in endometriosis, defining it largely as the interval between symptom onset and diagnostic surgery, and synthesizing findings from earlier studies showing substantial delays (estimated up to 10.4 years), frequent misdiagnosis, and longer delays for pelvic pain compared with infertility; it also notes that delay for deep infiltrating endometriosis diagnosis can be longer in advanced stage IV disease. It highlights potential contributors at patient, disease, and physician levels—such as normalization or suppression of symptoms, reliance on nondiscriminatory investigations, lack of awareness or confidence, and overlapping symptoms with other morbidities—and emphasizes additional health-system policy factors, including gaps and contradictions in clinical guidelines and limited evidence from randomized trials. A key limitation is that the piece is not a new primary study and presents an interpretive review of published reports rather than original data. This paper is centrally about endometriosis — it focuses specifically on diagnostic delay in endometriosis and the multi-level causes and implications of delayed diagnosis.

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Condition tags

endometriosis

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

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