Summary Endometriosis is a disease that affects 1 in 10 women in Norway, and there is no cure. In experiments with mice, researchers have now found that migraine medication can help with the pain and prevent endometriosis from getting worse. The medicine blocks a protein called CGRP, which is involved in pain signaling and the growth of endometriosis tissue. If this also works in humans, it will be a completely new way of treating endometriosis. The summary is made by an AI service from OpenAI. The content is quality assured by news’s journalists before publication. – It is a disease that affects very differently. Some people have pain that they can handle just fine, but there are also many who walk around with chronic, serious pain. Senior doctor Guri Majak says so. She is head of the National Competence Service for endometriosis and adenomyosis. Endometriosis affects up to 1 in 10 women in Norway. Simply explained, endometriosis is when tissue similar to mucous membranes grows outside the uterus. This is an illustration of female reproductive organs, with incipient, growing endometriosis tissue. The organs are in pink and rose-red, the endometriosis is in black spots spread around. Illustration: Ingrid Reime / news The most common symptom is severe pain before and during the period. Someone bleeds extra heavily or irregularly. The disease can also make it painful to go to the toilet or have sex. The problem is that there is no cure. For some, it can help with hormones, for example birth control pills and hormonal IUDs. For others, it may be appropriate to have surgery to remove the tissue that has started to grow outside the uterus. But now researchers hope that they may have found something that can both help with the pain, and perhaps prevent the endometriosis from getting worse. Blocks pain Guri Majak says that work is being done to create new treatments with two different starting points. One is to invent something completely new, for example a medicine that is made specifically for endometriosis. It’s complicated, and the road to get there is long. The second is to use medicines that are approved for diseases that are similar. It can go much faster, and that is what the researchers at Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital have done. Guri Majak is an endometriosis surgeon with many years of experience in the field. Photo: Kristin Granbo / news There are several medicines for chronic migraine, also approved here in Norway, which block a protein called CGRP. What the researchers have done is to use the migraine medication in mice with endometriosis to see what happens. Nervar in play Michael Rogers works by day at the hospital in Boston. He has long collaborated with the University of Bergen, and he just returned home to the USA from a stay in Norway. He explains that the nerves send the information they pick up to the brain. For example, that you get hurt from being stung on the hand by a bee. But they also send information to the nearby immune system. One way they do this is by releasing CGRP. Rogers’ team found that when nerves that sense pain are triggered by the endometriosis tissue, CGRP causes some immune cells to behave differently, causing the tissue to grow more. – When we block that process, we see smaller changes in the tissue, Rogers wrote in an email to news. The mice also suffered less pain. – Some types of pain disappeared completely, others were greatly reduced. The amount of abnormal tissue was reduced by 50%, he says. Mice are not human Rogers says that the value of the study published in Science Translational Medicine depends entirely on whether this also works in humans. – If it does, this will be a completely new way of treating endometriosis and could mean a lot to many women. Majak agrees. – Mice are not human. It must be tested on humans to confirm that it works. In any case, she does not believe that migraine medicine will act as a switch that turns off the pain for everyone with endometriosis. – But it can be a deal breaker for some patients. In particular, she points to those who have chronic pain due to the disease. – Many go untreated for a long time, and if you go on for a long time, the pain becomes chronic. Published 10.11.2024, at 13.45
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Migraine medicine helped against endometriosis in mice – may provide new treatment – news Trøndelag – Local news, TV and radio
