Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Tests and diagnosis
By Mayo Clinic staffTo diagnose endometriosis and other conditions that can cause pelvic pain, your doctor will ask you to describe your symptoms, including the location of your pain and when it occurs.
Tests to check for physical clues of endometriosis include:
- Pelvic exam. During a pelvic exam, your doctor manually feels (palpates) areas in your pelvis for abnormalities, such as cysts on your reproductive organs or scars behind your uterus. Often it's not possible to feel small areas of endometrial implantation, unless they've caused a cyst to form.
- Ultrasound. During a vaginal ultrasound, a wand-shaped scanner (transducer) is inserted into your vagina. In an ultrasound of the pelvis via the abdomen, a small scanner is moved across your abdomen. Both tests use sound waves to provide a video image of your reproductive organs. Ultrasound imaging won't definitively tell your doctor whether or not you have endometriosis, but it is a useful tool for identifying cysts associated with endometriosis (endometriomas).
-
Laparoscopy. The only way for your doctor to know for certain that you have endometriosis is by looking inside your abdomen (direct visualization) for signs of endometrial tissue. Commonly, this is accomplished during a minor surgical procedure called laparoscopy.
You receive a general anesthetic before the procedure begins. Using a special needle, your abdomen is expanded (distended) with carbon dioxide gas so that the reproductive organs are easier to see. A tiny incision is made near your navel, and a slender viewing instrument (laparoscope) is inserted. By moving the laparoscope around, the surgeon can view the pelvic and other abdominal organs, looking for signs of endometrial implants.
If you have endometriosis, laparoscopy will tell you and your doctor the extent, size and location of endometrial tissue outside your uterus. This information will help your doctor guide you through treatment options. Sometimes, symptoms and signs are obvious enough that a laparoscopy isn't necessary.
- Blood test. Cancer antigen 125 (CA 125) is a blood test often used to detect tumor markers for certain cancers, but it's also used to detect a certain protein found in the blood of women with endometriosis. Although CA 125 commonly reveals an elevation in such blood protein in women with advanced endometriosis, it's not as sensitive to mild or moderate disease. As with cancer, CA 125 doesn't perform well as a screening test for endometriosis because it's least sensitive when the disease is in its earliest stages.
