Author: Dr. Rahul Singh
Medical Advisor, Bhargava Phytolab Pvt. Ltd.
Address for correspondence:
Dr. Rahul Singh
Care ‘N Cure Homoeopathic Health Centre
182, Main Road Mandawali, Near Badi Masjid,
Delhi
Email: drsingh_29@rediff.com
Introduction
Uterine fibroids, also called as Leiomyomas or myomas, are very common benign (non-cancerous) over growths that develop in the muscular wall of the uterus. They can be very tiny to larger than a cricket ball in size. In most of the cases, there is more than one fibroid in the uterus. Some times fibroids can be asymptomatic, but most of the time due to their size and location, fibroids can lead to problems for some women like abdominal pain and heavy bleeding. Rarely they can develop in to cancer. Even though their pathogenesis is not clearly known, there is considerable evidence that estrogen and progesterone proliferate the growth of fibroids, as they rarely appear before menarche and regress after menopause.
Background
In the period of Hippocrates in 460-375 B.C., this lesion was known as the “uterine stone”. Galen called this finding “scleromas” during the second century of the Christian period. The term fibroid was coined and introduced in 1860 by Rokitansky and in the 1863 by Klob.
In 1854, a German pathologist named Virchow demonstrated that these neoplasms (fibroids) were composed from smooth muscle cells. It was Virchow who introduced the word “myoma”.