Abhishek Mahajan (narrator / author)

This may not be the case, but it's hard to tell from the literature alone.

One study notes that diagnosis is slowest when symptoms are vague or non-disabling, potentially implying that this undiscovered set of endometriosis would yield fewer DALYs.

On the other hand, one could imagine the DALYs being higher for some fraction of the undiagnosed condition if the lack of hormonal or surgical management leads to more severe complications down the line.

Heading Conclusion

Endometriosis is a remarkable disease.

It is something that, despite being studied for centuries, has eluded an understanding of its origins, has an uncanny resemblance to cancer, and lacks any effective curative or management methods.

Yet, it stands almost entirely alone in terms of how little funding the condition receives relative to the absolute number of lives it irrevocably alters for the worse.

10% of women, or 190 million, worldwide, with only $29 million earmarked for them.

Understandably, characterizing any disease as interesting runs the risk of seeming flippant, especially given how intensely emotional the impact of it on patient lives can be.

Chronic pain, infertility, and life-altering disability.

This is not my intention.

Here, I use interesting as a way to convey a sense of unexpectedness.

Many aspects of endometriosis are deeply unexpected.

And, perhaps more practically and actionably for readers, it is unexpected in ways that are surely fertile ground for more research.

Of course, it's certainly a hard disease to tackle.

but so are cancer, Alzheimer's, and HIV, all of which have inspired generations of scientists to feverishly work towards understanding.

This is partially due to how high the expected impact of such research would likely be, but it'd be rewriting history to not also mention how deeply interesting those conditions were to the people studying them.

Talk to any oncology researcher about pancreatic cancer, and they will mention the awfully high death rate, but will also light up when discussing the strangely dense stromal microenvironment that seems to shield it from treatment.

The fascination is inseparable from the fight.

And it feels like very few people have tried to cover the fascinating part of the disease, only the fight.