Treatment avoids surgery, preserves uterus
FRIDAY, April 1 (HealthDay News) -- A nonsurgical treatment for uterine fibroids, known as uterine fibroid embolization (UFE), has a five-year success rate of 73 percent, according to a new study involving 182 women.
"Some gynecologists have been waiting for long-term data before being comfortable recommending the UFE procedure, and now that we have that data, I think patients will be hearing more about UFE as a nonsurgical option," principal investigator Dr. James B. Spies, professor of interventional radiology at Georgetown University Medical Center, said in a prepared statement.
The study was presented Friday at the annual scientific meeting of the Society of Interventional Radiology, in New Orleans. The Georgetown team presented similar findings at last year's meeting.
Uterine fibroids are common benign growths that develop in the muscular wall of the uterus. About 40 percent of American women 35 and older develop these growths each year, resulting in about 200,000 hysterectomies annually.
UFE is an interventional radiology treatment that blocks the blood supply to fibroid tumors, causing them to shrink and die. Because it's minimally invasive, the treatment offers a faster recovery time than surgery and preserves the uterus -- two factors that have made UFE increasingly popular.
"The [study] results are comparable to myomectomy, a procedure in which the fibroids are surgically removed, but UFE is less invasive, and women recover from it more quickly," Spies said.
"With any of the uterine-sparing treatments, growth of new fibroids is possible," he noted, "and we saw this occurring in some patients during the later part of the follow-up in this study." However, Spies added, "the same phenomenon is seen with myomectomy, with re-intervention rates in the same range."
"The next step in fibroid research is to design direct comparative studies between the various therapies to provide data as to which patients are best suited for each treatment," he said.
SOURCE: Society of Interventional Radiology, news release, March 23, 2005
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