Bowel Endometriosis Mimicking Crohn Disease

Foulon A, Arthur Foulon, Raphael Pichois, Pichois R, Raphaël Pichois, Sabbagh C, Charles Sabbagh, Mathurin Fuméry, Mathurin Fumery, Fumery M
Inflammatory bowel diseases · 2021 · vol. 27(3) , pp. e26–e27 · doi:10.1093/ibd/izaa345 · PMID:33393611 · W3119063696
letter OA: closed CC0 ⤵ 3 in-corpus citations
View on OpenAlex View on PubMed View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by gemini-2.5-flash-lite, 2026-06-09 ⓘ

This paper discusses how bowel endometriosis can present with gastrointestinal symptoms that mimic Crohn's disease, leading to diagnostic challenges.

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

Abstract

To the editors, Endometriosis is a chronic disease that affects approximately 10% of women. Gastrointestinal symptoms are frequent in patients with endometriosis; indeed, the bowel is the main site for endometriosis outside the genital tract (observed in 4% to 37% of patients).1 The rectosigmoid colon is the most frequent site for bowel endometriosis (in 51% of patients), followed by the appendix (15%), the rectum (14%), the small bowel (15%), and the cecum (5%).2 Isolated digestive endometriosis (ie, in the absence of a pelvic disease site) is observed in 20% of patients.2 The most common symptoms of endometriosis are dysmenorrhea, deep dyspareunia, pain on defecation during menstruation, and chronic pain; however, some patients are asymptomatic. Other rarer gastrointestinal symptoms include diarrhea, constipation, rectal bleeding, dyschezia, tenesmus, abdominal distension, and (in late-stage disease) obstructive symptoms. Hence, some patients with bowel endometriosis are diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome. In very...

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Condition tags

endometriosisbowel_endometriosisdysmenorrheadyspareuniairritable_bowel_syndrome

MeSH descriptors

Crohn Disease Crohn Disease Endometriosis Endometriosis Diagnosis, Differential Female Humans

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 (2)

Cited by (5)

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-09-21T06:08:07.822426+00:00
openalex
last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
pubmed
last seen: 2026-05-13T22:25:00.839251+00:00
unpaywall
last seen: 2026-09-24T06:17:16.569905+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK