Biomarkers of endometriosis: How far have we come and where are we going?

Vid Janša, Joško Osredkar, Eda Vrtačnik Bokal, Tea Lanišnik Rižner, Helena Ban Frangež
In: Slovenian Medical Journal · 2021 · vol. 90(5-6) , pp. 256–265 · doi:10.6016/zdravvestn.3056 · W3167378142
article OA: diamond CC0 ⤵ 3 in-corpus citations
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⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This report describes hypothesis-driven and hypothesis-generating approaches for endometriosis biomarker discovery, highlighting potential candidates and emphasizing the need for clinician-researcher collaboration to improve patient quality of life.

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⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This report evaluates progress in endometriosis biomarker discovery by describing both hypothesis-driven and hypothesis-generating approaches, and summarizing candidate biomarkers and their reported diagnostic performance (sensitivity and specificity). It frames the problem as the absence of reliable non-invasive tests compared with the laparoscopic “gold standard” and discusses prior and more recent work from the authors’ perspective, including proteomic and other biomarker strategies. A key caveat emphasized is that future studies should improve patient quality of life rather than focusing only on statistically significant biomarker differences, implying a need for clinically relevant endpoints. This paper is centrally about endometriosis — it reviews and conceptualizes biomarker development for non-invasive diagnosis of endometriosis and highlights research priorities and limitations in this field.

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Abstract

Endometriosis is a common gynaecological disease that is characterized by endometrium-like tissue outside the uterine cavity. Endometriosis significantly compromises the quality of life of women and is a major cause of infertility. The gold standard for diagnosis of endometriosis is visual inspection by laparoscopy, which significantly prolongs the time to final diagnosis. This lack of non-invasive diagnostic approaches is why the discovery of biomarkers for endometriosis has been defined as a research priority. In this report, we describe hypothesis-driven and hypothesis-generating approaches for biomarker discovery, along with some important potential biomarkers of endometriosis and their diagnostic characteristics, sensitivities, and specificities. Finally, we present our perspective on the discovery of biomarkers for endometriosis, and discuss some results from our previous and more recent studies. Future studies must focus on improving patient quality of life rather than on discovering significant differences, and therefore close collaboration between clinicians and pre-clinical researchers is essential.

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endometriosisinfertility

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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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last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
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