Chocolate Cyst

Chocolate Cyst

Chocolate Cyst (Endometrioma)

Chocolate cyst, which is among the most common causes of female infertility; It is a health problem characterized by the growth of endometrial tissues that line the uterus and shed with the menstrual period, usually due to undetected reasons. Chocolate cyst can occur in the bladder, intestines and ovaries. If it occurs in the ovaries, it is possible to encounter female infertility problem.

Chocolate cysts, which can cause chronic pelvic pain, increase the risk of ovarian cancer, make it difficult to get pregnant, and disrupt the working order of the ovaries, make their effects felt with many different symptoms.

What Are the Symptoms of Chocolate Cyst?

The most common symptom of chocolate cyst is severe and chronic pain in the lower abdomen. This pain, which increases in intensity especially during menstrual periods, can cause women to have very difficult menstrual periods. Apart from abdominal pain, excessive bleeding during menstrual periods and pain during sexual intercourse are among the symptoms of chocolate cyst. Chocolate cysts, which may also have symptoms such as inability to conceive, irregular menstrual periods, pain in the breech region, and recurrent pregnancy losses, may not cause any distinctive complaints in some women.

What Causes Chocolate Cyst?

Although the causes of chocolate cyst, also known as endometrioma, are not known clearly, there are some factors that are considered to be risk factors for this condition. Genetic factors, environmental factors, dietary habits can affect women in the reproductive period.

Chocolate Cyst Treatment

During the diagnosis of chocolate cyst, doctors obtain detailed information about the patient's symptoms and use imaging methods such as ultrasound and MRI. At the same time, they diagnose the presence of cysts by laparoscopy.

Within the scope of chocolate cyst treatment, a road map is drawn according to the age of the patient, the severity of the symptoms experienced, whether he wants a baby in the future and his treatment preferences.

If the patient's problems due to the chocolate cyst are not disturbing, follow-up treatment can be applied. The patient is followed for approximately 6-8 weeks. Another alternative is drug therapy. In order to reduce the patient's complaints, it is tried to control the complaints of the chocolate cyst with drugs that prevent the release of estrogen and enable the person to enter temporary menopause.

Surgical treatment options are applied for patients who experience severe pain due to a chocolate cyst, whose quality of life decreases and whose symptoms cannot be controlled with medications. In this laparoscopic procedure, cyst capsules can be removed or the cyst can be emptied. If the patient does not want to have children in the future, hysterectomy operation, in which the ovaries are removed, can be performed.