Can Fibroids Come Back After UFE?

A common question before treatment — here’s what the research actually shows about fibroid recurrence after Uterine Fibroid Embolization.

If you’re weighing your fibroid treatment options, one of the most reasonable questions to ask is: will this actually last, or will I be back here again in a few years? It’s a fair question, and the honest answer depends on what “coming back” actually means.

UFE Treats Every Fibroid Present at the Time of Treatment

One of the real strengths of UFE is that it isn’t selective — when the procedure blocks blood flow to the uterine arteries feeding your fibroids, it affects all of the fibroids present at that time, regardless of size or number. Unlike a myomectomy, where a surgeon removes fibroids one at a time and could miss very small ones, UFE addresses the entire fibroid burden in a single treatment.

So Why Do Some Women Develop New Symptoms Later?

The distinction that matters here is between a treated fibroid regrowing and a new fibroid developing. Fibroids that have been successfully embolized have lost their blood supply and typically continue to shrink over time — they don’t “come back” in the sense of regaining blood flow and growing again. What can happen, especially in younger women who still have many years of active hormone exposure ahead of them, is the development of an entirely new fibroid, separate from the ones originally treated. This is a different phenomenon from treatment failure or recurrence, and it’s the same reason surgical options like myomectomy also carry a risk of “new” fibroids appearing years later — fibroids are hormonally driven, and as long as a woman is producing estrogen and progesterone, the underlying tissue conditions that allow fibroids to form haven’t gone away.

How This Compares to Surgical Options

This is actually a point in UFE’s favor when compared to myomectomy specifically: because UFE treats the vascular supply to the whole uterus rather than removing individual fibroids, it doesn’t rely on a surgeon successfully locating and removing every single fibroid, including ones too small to detect on imaging at the time of surgery. A hysterectomy, by contrast, eliminates any possibility of future fibroids by removing the uterus entirely — but that’s a much larger tradeoff for most women, particularly those still hoping to have children.

What This Means for You

If you’re symptom-free after UFE and then develop new symptoms years later, that’s worth a follow-up evaluation — but it doesn’t mean your original treatment failed. It’s a reasonable, expected possibility given how fibroids develop in the first place, not a sign that UFE “didn’t work.”

Learn more on our Uterine Fibroid Embolization page, or read our companion post on UFE vs. Hysterectomy vs. Myomectomy.