Diagnóstico laboratorial da endometriose e novas metodologias de diagnóstico: revisão bibliográfica

Endometriosis is a chronic disease, benign, estrogen-dependent, followed by pelvic pain and infertility, coming over women of reproductive age in the majority. Studies show that it is related to risk and environmental factors and hormonal, genetic and immunological alterations. For many women, endometriosis disturbs and compromises their wellbeing, personal relationships and time spent out of their routine activities, bringing the need of surgery and expensive treatments, reducing their life quality and, mainly, their self-esteem. The diagnosis is made after suspects from patient’s clinical history along with physical exams and confirmed by lab exams, especially the dosage of serum glycoprotein CA-125.Furthermore, the diagnosis must be associated to image examinations such as: transvaginal ultrasound and magnetic resonance. Nevertheless, the gold standard for this pelvic illness is the surgical evaluation by laparoscopy, when a small fragment of the suspected tissue is withdrawn (biopsy) for an anatomopathological evaluation. In many cases, surgical procedure is not necessary and the predictive diagnosis is made through the examinations cited before, although they present some inespecificity. Under these circumstances, the rapid diagnosis, less invasive, precise and specific is essential for a premature treatment and increasing of these women’s life quality. The lack on specificity and the difficulty from the specialized diagnosis methods may result in a long delay for disease’s detection and its consequent treatment. Important advances were made in the last years, maintaining the promise of the development of new diagnosis and therapeutic methods aiming at the precise detection and improvement of symptoms. In this sense, this work will present a bibliographic review on lab diagnosis, serum markers used on the clinic routine, including the new techniques and methodologies for diagnosis used nowadays in clinic researches.