Do IVF drugs make endometriosis worse?

It is a very good question because it is known that high levels of estrogen could flare up the endometriosis. However, there have been some publications showing that undergoing hormonal treatment for IVF treatment is not significantly increasing the risk of endometriosis or the advancing of the disease.

IVF drugs and endometriosis, the only thing with endometriosis, if you are given IVF medication (stimulation medication) what we are doing is – you have your symptoms already but we given some medication to have many eggs from your ovary in one cycle because usually you only have one egg every month and this egg is just secreting rupture and inside the follicle that cook this egg every month, in these floats there is estrogen hormone that going inside your tummy, stimulate the endometriosis inside your tummy and then you will have more symptoms but in IVF medication, we stimulate the ovary to have many eggs and all these eggs will not allow it to ovulate. We will not keep it from rupturing so we’ll take all this float by a needle outside your tummy to collect all these eggs and will prevent it from touching your tummy. So basically, we prevent endometriosis from happening to your tummy, so it will not make the symptoms worse. If you have symptoms, it will stay the same, it will not affect the endometriosis.
What can affect the endometriosis and lead it to flare if we are doing IUI (Intrauterine Insemination) or if we are doing ovarian stimulation which is a common practice nowadays. After the surgery, instead of going to have IVF directly so you will try ovulation stimulation and they will start giving medication then you will have disruptions, you will have the symptoms exaggerated again and this is the way you feel that the symptoms are worse – if we are given a stimulation or we are doing IUI (Intrauterine Insemination) where we are inserting the semen or sperm into the womb by injection not taking these eggs from outside like what we are doing in IVF.

No, they can’t.

It is quite unlikely but normally, if the lady has a very active endometriosis, is a very big chocolate cyst we call it or material it’s cis causing a lot of discomfort normally, the advice is to try to remove it uh prior to IVF because we are very very careful or cautious in dealing with a large ovarian endometriosis because the more we operate on the ovary the higher chance that we reduce the number of eggs available for IVF (so we call it uh over a reserve) but if the lady has a lot of pain with a quiet big cyst more than five centimeters, we might advise removal and then straight away we start stimulation. The stimulation is unlikely to cause flare up and if it does, of course, it’s on balance we have the lady we asked the lady would you like to consider fertility treatment or you want to consider pain treatment so, that’s the way you balance it but it is quite unlikely during IVF flare up will happen.