Figuring Out Fibroids
Studies examine a common, yet mysterious, tumor
By Ben Harder
There was a lot that Cynthia Morton didn’t know about uterine fibroids when she began studying them in 1989. She didn’t know, for instance, that she already had or would soon develop one. That revelation came during her pregnancy in 1991, when a fibroid showed up on an ultrasound test she had received to monitor the pregnancy. For Morton, a geneticist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the mass of fibrous, abnormal tissue in her uterus has not caused any noticeable problems. But some women who develop fibroids have trouble getting pregnant, and others experience heavy menstrual bleeding and intense pain that can be alleviated only by surgical removal of the uterus. In the United States, fibroids are the leading cause for that operation, a hysterectomy.
Like a cancer, a fibroid arises from a single abnormal cell that multiplies and forms a tumor. In contrast to malignant tumors, however, fibroids rarely spread to other parts of the body but rather remain in the uterus. There, one fibroid or several independent fibroids can crop up at any point during a woman’s reproductive years and can grow many centimeters across.