Endometriosis - New Treatments Emerge
Innovative therapies and womb transplant successes are changing lives
Ric Edelman: It's Thursday, March 14th. On today's show, endometriosis - big news for women suffering with this disease. There are 200 million women worldwide who have endometriosis. Jean had this. She developed it pretty soon after we got out of college. And I can tell you it is not just painful, it is debilitating. Jean would come home from work every day. She would just curl up into a ball on the sofa. The endometrium lines the uterus. Every month, that lining gets shed, and that's what a period is. But sometimes the endometrial tissue grows outside the uterus. That's a problem. Severe pain, inflammation, internal bleeding, fatigue and infertility. There's no cure. There wasn't then when Jean had it, and there isn't today. The only temporary relief is getting pregnant because you don't have a period when you're pregnant. The problem, of course, as you can guess, a lot of the women who have endometriosis can't get pregnant. So the only other cure is surgery to remove the ovaries. That stops periods, obviously, but also it also stops any hope of pregnancy. The only drug that's been on the market as a treatment for these last 50 years was Danazol. It's still on the market. It's been around since the early 70s. It has one of the longest lists of serious side effects of any drug I've ever seen. Jean and I refuse to have her take it. So Jean, with my support, chose surgery instead. Even surgery had risks. Not just all the obvious usual risks of surgery, but the risk that removing your ovaries might not eliminate the debilitating pain. And finding a surgeon who was willing to perform this drastic surgery on a 24-year-old, that wasn't easy. In the end, Jean had to have surgery twice, and thankfully the second one was a success. She's been pain free ever since. That was our sole goal.
I can't tell you how many women Jean's talked to over the years. She's pretty public about her experience, which is why she said, it's okay for me to talk with you about it here. She's talked with so many women over the years who have shared that they too have had or currently have endometriosis. The World Health Organization says one out of ten women have this. It's about the same number of people who have diabetes. We've got a lot of great treatments for diabetes, though, but still endometriosis today, it's right where it was when Jean had it over 40 years ago. Women today are facing the same challenges with endometriosis today, the same difficult decisions that Jean faced way back when. But finally, now it looks like we have some progress. There's a clinical trial of an experimental drug that just showed great results, and they're hoping when results of the next trial that the FDA will approve this drug by the end of the decade. If they do, it will be the first new endometriosis treatment in over four decades. And there's also related news doctors are now starting to do transplants of the womb. This is a cure for women who were born without a uterus. Who or who had to have a hysterectomy like Jean because of their endometriosis. So far, 90 women have received these transplants and we've produced 49 babies as a result of that. And 40% of these donors are alive. This is becoming a thing, just like kidney donors. Pretty exciting medical innovations. On tomorrow's show, should you keep your mortgage in retirement?
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