Abstract
ABSTRACT Uterine fibroids (or leiomyomas), on the one hand, are common benign (noncancerous) smooth muscle tumors arise from the muscular part of the uterus and considered one of the major causes of abnormal uterine bleeding in women of reproductive age group even though the main reason is not yet known exactly. On the other hand, the leiomyosarcomas or LMS (cancerous), which are rapidly growing, are malignant tumors arise in post-menopausal women and often detected as an incidental finding in hysterectomy specimens. In this study, the incidence of uterine smooth muscle tumors (leiomyosarcoma and leiomyoma) in the Libyan woman and their distribution among the different age groups (from 11 to 80 years old), their type, location and the way of therapy was investigated. The study was conducted at Diagnostic Histopathology Laboratory in Tripoli Medical Center (TMC) Hospital, involving 1952 cases covering the period of twelve years (from January 2002 to December 2013). The obtained results indicated that the leiomyoma cases were much higher than leiomyosarcoma cases, which represented 99.28% compared to 0.71%. Moreover, the prevalence of leiomyoma cases reached the top value on the year 2008 with 24.6%. Additionally, sharp increase in the incidence of leiomyoma cases was observed in the age group between 30 and 50 years old with more than 40%. Similarly, the highest number of leiomyosarcoma cases was detected in the median ages of women (from 30s to 50s) compared to the other age groups. The obtained differences in the incidence trend of the analyzed cases and their different age/ year distributions are highly expected to reveal possible differences in their risk factors. Accordingly, additional investigations for the reasons behind such differences are required and recommended. This large variation in the incidence of occurrence of both types of uterine tumors and their sharp increase at a particular age group is not fully clear, however further investigation will be carried out based on this survey.