Endometriosis is regarded as a hormone-dependent disease. Current therapeutic approaches to treating this common gynecological disorder mainly depend on surgical and hormonal interventions, but the high rate of disease recurrence as well as the side effects related to such therapies make it difficult for patients to recover completely. Molecular evidence has recently suggested that the source of endometriosis can be both hormone-dependent and influenced by the dysregulation of some signaling cascades. In this review, we focus on the non-hormonal triggers of endometriosis and the pre-clinical compounds designed to correct these signaling defects in order to achieve a better understanding of the disease as well as novel approaches to treating it.
© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.