Fertility: S01 E31 – Fibroids – Dr. Whitten

Thank you for joining us again today for another educational video about fibroids today I’m Dr. Scott Whitten at the Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine I’m going to talk to you about fibroids and everything you want to know about fibroids how common they are how we treat them and what their impact is on one’s reproductive potential. So fibroids are quite common we see them in and all ethnic groups that  does occur a little bit more commonly in populations like the African American population but we see them in all groups including Caucasians Europeans Hispanics all groups are like now a lot of patients don’t know they have fibroids cause a lot of times are asymptomatic from them means they don’t have the symptoms of pressure or bleeding or infertility issues so they don’t even know they have mental until they come see us and then we discover them so patients are actually referred to as because of their fibroids they were discovered by another provider or they are causing symptoms but initially what you do when you evaluate for fibroids is you do something simple like the ultrasound of the pelvis and the ultrasound is a great tool that determine where fibroids are how big they are and their location most important because its really those two things will then determine whether the fibroids are going to impact your reproductive potential. Now fibroids come from the uterine muscle they’re called myometrial cells and when a myometrial cell in the muscle wall starts to replicate itself more rapidly than the rest of the uterus it forms this rubbery white balls of tissue and that’s what fibroids are I don’t know if you can see this or not on this diagram here but this shows you a uterus that’s full of fibroids and we call the fibroids by different terms base upon their locations such as this fibriod that’s inside the cavity of the uterus is an intracaviterior subserosal or submucosal fibroid fibroids of the current towards the outsider or called subserosal I know the term sound a lot alike and when you have fibroids that are in the muscle wall called intramural or through the wall and then some that are actually hanging off the top of the uterus or on the outside which are called pedunculated meaning you have a stock on them so where that fibroid is and the size of the fiber it really is going to determine its impact on one’s reproductive potential or symptoms. I’ve seen patients where they have fibroids all throughout their pelvis and none of them are in a location that caused any problems and then about same the patients where they had one fibroid and the fibroid was in the wrong location right in the middle of the uterus where the baby suppose to be growing and they have bleeding problems from having cramps so when you discover fibroids if it’s warranted that the fibroids are in locations where they’re going to cause problems for us then we start talking about treatments. And it’s really two methods to treat fibroids when would be a medication which is unfortunately only temporary and only causes shrinkage of fibroids but doesn’t cause him to go away completely and then the other form of treatment is surgical management and surgery the approach of the surgical treatment really depends upon where the fibroids located for example of a fibroid is inside the cavity of the uterus then you can use a hysteroscope or camera in the uterus that goes in here and you can shave out the fiber and take it out that way so no incisions on the abdomen you also might have fibroids that are all throughout the uterine muscle and that has to be approached from the abdominal approach where we have to actually make an incision into your tummy and you have to stay overnight in the hospital usually to remove all those five rights but the objective of the surgery regardless of which surgery you’re doing is to restore the anatomy back to normal so it will function normally for us and have the least impact adversely on a reproductive potential. If you guys have any more questions about fibroids if you’ve been diagnosed with fibroids were happy to provide you with some additional information please just call our office Nevada Center for Reproductive Medicine we’re happy to help.