Inflammation to Infertility: Panoramic View on Endometriosis

Huda A Mohammed Rasheed, Pousette Hamid
Cureus · 2020 · vol. 12(11) , pp. e11516 · doi:10.7759/cureus.11516 · PMID:33354460 · PMC7746006 · W3098082577
review OA: gold CC0 ⤵ 17 in-corpus citations
📄 Open PDF View on OpenAlex View on PubMed View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-08 ⓘ

This review summarizes recent findings on how inflammation, the hallmark of endometriosis, impacts oocyte, endometrium, hormones, and sperm, contributing to infertility in affected women.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-10 ⓘ

This review summarizes evidence linking inflammation to infertility in endometriosis, focusing on how inflammatory mediators affect oocytes, endometrium, hormones, and sperm, drawing on recent studies selected from PubMed/PMC plus older references. The paper reports that endometriosis is characterized by a local inflammatory microenvironment, with elevated cytokines and chemokines (including IL-6, IL-10, IL-13, and TNF-α) and altered immune activity that may support lesion growth and impair reproductive processes such as implantation, increasing pregnancy loss, and contributing to infertility. It also discusses limitations of current diagnostics, noting that CA-125 is mainly used for follow-up and lacks sensitivity/specificity for screening. This paper is centrally about endometriosis — it focuses specifically on inflammatory mechanisms that may explain endometriosis-associated infertility.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

Endometriosis is a disease caused by the implantation of endometrial glands and stroma outside the uterine cavity. It affects 10% of the reproductive-age women this means that 190 million women are affected worldwide. The definitive diagnosis requires surgical exploration or a laparoscopy which is of a high expense. The pathogenesis of the disease is heterogeneous and poorly understood despite the progress in the research field. Infertility is one of the main symptoms of Endometriosis. The mechanism behind this remains unclear. Literature suggests that Endometriosis reduces implantation capacity, increases the risk of pregnancy loss, and causes anatomical obstruction imposed by endometriotic lesions. The disease has a high burden to it by decreasing the quality of women's life and imposing negative consequences for their productivity, social life, and emotional wellbeing. Since inflammation is considered the hallmark of endometriosis, it is worth looking at the mechanism of how inflammation is linked to infertility in endometriosis patients. In this study, we summarized the recent finding of how inflammation can affect oocyte, endometrium, hormones, and sperm.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Condition tags

endometriosisinfertility

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.

References (51)

Cited by (17)

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-06-11T06:19:48.454388+00:00
openalex
last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
pubmed
last seen: 2026-05-13T22:21:30.380497+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK