Adhesions are scar tissue - often in the form of long strings which tie together various parts of your pelvis area, often caused by endometriosis, but can also be caused by surgery or other trauma.

Endo are cells in your body which are technically like those found in the lining of your uterus. They are red in color or black, or a few other shades (I'm not a doc, but have heard this). Adhesions I believe are primarily white in color.

One can have adhesions and no endo...but a more likely scenario if you were in major pain could be 1) your doc wasn't skilled enough to find the real endo (endo is hard to find!), or your doc did remove some endo, but the biopsy was a false negative. Dr. Cook's staff told me that many biopsy labs miss endo because they don't know what part of the tissue to test, so they test something - anything - only to totally miss testing the endo spots themselves.

Hope this helps.

Yes endo and adhesions are different. During 5 of the 6 laps I've had endo and adhesions were found.

Ok was having a hard time wording so I went to the internet, sure enough this did better justice to what I was trying to say. Hope it helps.

"Adhesions

Adhesions are bands of fibrous scar tissue, which forms inside the body. They can be found anywhere in the body between almost all organs and tissue.

For women with endometriosis, they may bind an ovary to the side of the pelvic wall, or they may extend between the bladder and the uterus, etc.

Women with endometriosis describe the pain associated with adhesions as stabbing, sharp, pulling, sickening, intense and nauseating whereas adjectives most commonly used to describe active endometriosis pain itself are burning, pinching, dull, heavy, and miserable [1].

Whilst adhesions are more often than not spoken of as a postoperative complication then this does not necessarily hold entirely true for women with endometriosis, eventhough they, of course, are a group of people who often have had numerous surgeries and thereby, by that factor alone, increase their risk of developing further adhesions [2].

Endometriosis, however, can cause local inflammation, which is a key factor in adhesion formation. Adhesions may therefore form as a result of endometrial implants bleeding onto the area around them, causing inflammation, which again leads to the formation of scar tissue as ironically part of the healing process.

Unfortunately, sometimes this injured tissue does not just form a scar it comes into contact with another inflamed area nearby and forms a band of scar tissue an adhesion between these two areas. Adhesions vary in appearances from thin, flimy and transparent to thick, dense, and opaque. In some cases, adhesions have been found to such a extent throughout the pelvis to create what is known as a frozen or fixed pelvis.

Just like endometriosis itself, adhesions can cause pain and subsequently affect a womans quality of life to the extent that her day-to-day activities are impaired [3,4].

Yet, whilst the problem of adhesions in endometrisis is widely recognised, there is at the moment no way of preventing them, when caused by the disease alone, nor a fool proof profylactic which can be applied during surgery, though many companies are at present working on finding a product which prevents adhesions."