Experimental Endometriosis: Review of the Literature Through a Century and the Iranian Experience

Although endometriosis is not a newly discovered disease, it has still remained enigmatic. Understanding the pathophysiology of this disease is still one of the challenges of gynecology and reproductive medicine. Therefore, the subject of endometriosis treatment faces many questions to be answered. Even though this is not considered to be a rare disease, testing novel treatments on subjects is definitely contrary to medical ethics. This is where importance of animal studies is emphasized. History of animal studies on endometriosis dates back to the time when the young John Sampson presented his theory of retrograde flow of menstruation to the gynecologic society of his time to explain the mechanism of endometriosis. However, most of the medical society of that time favored metaplasia as the main mechanism over the new theory. In order to prove Sampson's theory, animal models were used to induce endometriosis, and that was the first study of experimental endometriosis. Nowadays, although no one uses animals to evaluate Sampson theory of endometriosis, however, experimental endometriosis is widely used to study many different aspects of the disease from pathogenesis to possible options for treatments. Also, since then, various animals and different techniques have been proposed and so there is a huge body of literature on experimental endometriosis. Contrary to many countries, Iranian medical societies have neglected animal models for endometriosis until recently. This review article aims to go through the prominent articles on the subject and introduce different animals and methods to its readers and have a special look at Iranian literature on experimental endometriosis.