1. Introduction
Endometriosis affects approximately 10% of all women of reproductive age and results in symptoms of chronic pelvic pain, including dysmenorrhea, dyspareunia, and infertility [1] and [2]. The treatment strategy for endometriosis depends on the age of the patient, extent of the disease, severity of the symptoms, and the patient's desire for fertility [3]. Therapeutic options include medication, surgery, or combination therapy [4]. Although medical treatment is efficient, it is associated with adverse effects such as delayed pregnancy and recurrence of disease after treatment cessation. Local excision of endometriosis can produce good short-term outcomes but this approach has a high reoperation rate. In advanced disease, hysterectomy is associated with a low reoperation rate; therefore, the use of hysterectomy is a viable option for women with severe endometriosis who do not wish to undergo future pregnancies [5].
With the advancement of surgical techniques, the use of laparoscopic hysterectomy (LH) has become more frequent. Many studies have shown that LH results in appreciably reduced morbidity—in terms of intraoperative blood loss, need for blood transfusion, length of hospital stay, and rate of surgical complications—than does abdominal hysterectomy (AH) [6], [7], [8], [9] and [10]. Indeed, a study demonstrated that the use of LH is safe and feasible even in the presence of a myoma (with uterus size equivalent to more than 14 weeks of pregnancy) [11]. However, these studies were all performed in women with little or no adhesive gynecologic disease, whereas endometriosis is usually characterized by such disease. The present study, therefore, aimed to compare the operative time, blood loss, need for blood transfusion, length of hospital stay, and both surgical and postoperative complications in patients with severe pelvic endometriosis who underwent either LH or AH.