Combined ethanol and lauromacrogol sclerotherapy for ovarian endometriotic cysts: a retrospective clinical and experimental study

Ovarian endometriotic cysts can reduce ovarian reserve, and surgery may further damage ovarian tissue. Ultrasound-guided sclerotherapy is a less invasive option, but evidence for combined sclerosants is limited. We retrospectively evaluated 84 women with ovarian endometriotic cysts treated with combined ethanol–lauromacrogol sclerotherapy and performed a complementary mouse experiment to assess short-term changes. One month after treatment, cyst diameter, cyst volume and serum CA-125 were significantly reduced. Serum AMH, FSH and LH did not significantly change, procedural pain was generally mild, and no major procedure-related complications were recorded. AFC increased after treatment, although this may reflect better sonographic visualization after cyst shrinkage rather than improved ovarian function. In mice with OEC-like lesions, ethanol, lauromacrogol, and combined treatment reduced cyst burden within 7 days, but the combined regimen did not demonstrate superiority over either monotherapy. Collagen deposition was lower in treated groups, while serum AMH and CTGF did not differ significantly among groups. These findings suggest that combined ethanol–lauromacrogol sclerotherapy is feasible for selected patients and is associated with short-term cyst reduction without early measurable deterioration in selected ovarian reserve-related markers. Comparative clinical benefit, long-term recurrence control, and reproductive safety remain unestablished and require prospective controlled studies with longer follow-up. Similar content being viewed by others

The authors thank the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Experimental Animal Center of The Second Affiliated Hospital, Army Medical University, for their support during this study. The authors also thank all patients included in the clinical cohort. Funding This work was supported by the Chongqing Municipal Key Project of Technological Innovation and Application Development (grant number CSTB2022TIAD-KPX0182 to ZQC), the Chongqing Natural Science Foundation General Project (grant numbers CSTB2024NSCQ-MSX0020 to XX). The funders had no role in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Author information Authors and Affiliations Corresponding authors Ethics declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. Ethics approval and consent to participate The clinical study was approved by the Ethics Committee of The Second Affiliated Hospital, Army Medical University, Chongqing, China (approval No. 2021-093-02). The Ethics Committee waived the requirement for written informed consent for the retrospective review of existing clinical data. Separately, written informed consent for the interventional sclerotherapy procedure was obtained from all patients before treatment. Written permission was obtained from the two author-clinicians shown in Fig. 1 A for publication of their images under the applicable Scientific Reports open-access license. These individuals are not study participants. All animal procedures were approved by the Animal Ethics Committee of The Second Affiliated Hospital, Army Medical University (Third Military Medical University), Chongqing, China (approval No. AMUWEC20223878) and were conducted in accordance with institutional guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals. Additional information Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Supplementary Information Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material. Rights and permissions Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. About this article Cite this article Yin, X., Sun, X., Cai, Z. et al. Combined ethanol and lauromacrogol sclerotherapy for ovarian endometriotic cysts: a retrospective clinical and experimental study. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-73509-4 Received: Accepted: Published: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-73509-4