"I wish to God someone had sat me down when I was 30 and said, ‘You need to be having babies now,’ ” says Elaine Foran, a 40-year-old celebrity agent. Foran has had three miscarriages as a result of fibroids, a condition that affects up to half of all women, yet is often misdiagnosed or ignored. “It wasn’t until I had a miscarriage that the fibroids were spotted on a scan,” she says. “Nobody had even suggested I might have them before. People are quite embarrassed to talk about them. I bet if it was a condition that affected men, we would all know more.”

Fibroids are noncancerous growths of muscle tissue that form in the uterus, and can lead to infertility and miscarriage. They usually occur when a woman is in her thirties or forties, which means they are becoming an issue for increasing numbers of women choosing to have children later in life.

Yet there seems to be a conspiracy of silence about fibroids; because there are often no symptoms, they are rarely mentioned or checked for, until it is too late. Treatment can also be hit and miss. Doctors used to perform a hysterectomy in serious cases, but now that is a less viable option, as more women want to remain fertile for longer.

After three miscarriages, Foran decided to seek private treatment, and last year she had 17 fibroids removed in an operation known as a myomectomy. This is a complicated surgical procedure with a number of risks, and it can make conceiving more difficult. Foran felt she had no choice. “If I hadn’t had the operation, it would have meant getting pregnant again and potentially losing another baby,” she says. “After my last miscarriage, I was very depressed. I would wake up every day at 4am, and it took me a long time to recover.”

Foran’s operation went well, but since then she has not been able to conceive. “It is early days, but I have always got pregnant really easily, so I’m worried. The problem is that the fibroids were on the wall of my uterus, and you can get scar tissue that stops an embryo attaching,” she says.

Lulu Levay, 37, an artist manager, also suffers from fibroids, and has found the standard of her treatment on the NHS to be patchy. When she started to suffer from painful periods at the beginning of last year, she went to her doctor and asked to be referred to a consultant. She did not get an appointment until September, and when she saw him, she had to fight to get a scan.

“He was really quizzing me about why I thought I had fibroids,” she says. “I insisted on a scan, and a month later they discovered that I did have them.” The consultant advised Levay to have a myomectomy, and her operation was scheduled for last January.

“This was the worst experience of my life,” she says. After the operation, she was dangerously anaemic and had to have a blood transfusion. Then she caught three infections while she was in hospital. “I was discharged on the fifth day and then I was ill the whole weekend. The doctors put me on antibiotics, but, two and a half weeks later, my cut wasn’t healing, and I was admitted back to the hospital with a burst abscess.”

Eventually, Levay’s infections cleared up, but she still feels unwell. In desperation, she has taken out health insurance, hoping that a private gynaecologist might be able to help her.

Dr Raj Rai, a consultant gynaecologist and specialist in reproductive medicine at St Mary’s hospital, London, says that the success of a myomectomy is almost entirely down to the skill of the surgeon. “If a woman wishes to retain her fertility, then her operation should be done by a fertility surgeon,” he advises.

Certainly, Dixie Linder, 44, a film producer, believes that she would not have her two children today if she had not been treated by Dr Yehudi Gordon, a celebrity gynaecologist whose clients include Jerry Hall, Cate Blanchett and Elle Macpherson.

When she was pregnant at 39, she started to bleed, so she went to her local NHS hospital. “They told me I had miscarried and to come back in a month. I insisted on a scan, and discovered I hadn’t miscarried, but that I had fibroids.”

About four weeks later, Linder did miscarry, so she went to see Gordon. Because she was 40, he advised her to have a myomectomy. He removed 19 fibroids, and a few months later Linder conceived her first daughter.

When it came to the birth, however, she needed a caesarean, as a few remaining fibroids were blocking the birth canal. During the delivery, Gordon removed another three fibroids, and she lost seven pints of blood. “With my second daughter, I had far fewer problems,” she says. “I got the impression that I would have to have had many more miscarriages before the NHS would have investigated in the way that Dr Gordon did.”

Even after a successful operation, the remaining fibroids can be problematic. A woman with a history of fibroids would require a scan if she wanted a contraceptive coil fitted, for example.

Although nobody knows their exact cause Gordon suggests that lifestyle can be a factor. “If you are stressed and working in a busy job, you get a higher output of hormones from the ovaries. It is possible that this kind of lifestyle can increase the rate of hormone growth.”

However, there is some hope in a generally gloomy picture. Doctors are waking up to the problem, and two new safer, less invasive treatments are being tested. One, known as uterine embolisation, cuts the blood supply to the fibroids, causing them to dry up; the other, MRI-guided focused ultrasound, uses strong ultrasound waves to destroy them.

At present, they are available in only some hospitals, and more tests are needed. If they prove successful, these new treatments could be a welcome development for women struggling with fibroids and fertility.

Fibroids: the facts

Fibroids are benign growths of muscle that occur in the womb. They can be as small as a pea or as big as a melon. An estimated 20%-50% of women develop fibroids at some stage in their lives, usually those aged 30 to 50 who have not had children.

Symptoms can include heavy bleeding, weight gain, increased frequency of urination, back pain and trouble getting or staying pregnant. Many women, however, have no symptoms.

Fibroids are one of the leading reasons for hysterectomies, which are carried out on about 30,000 women a year in the UK. They are never removed during pregnancy because of the risk of bleeding.

The cause of fibroids is unknown, but genetics are a factor. If a woman’s mother had fibroids, her risk of having them is about three times higher than average.

An Italian study found that women who eat little meat but a lot of green vegetables and fruit seem less likely to develop fibroids than women who eat a lot of red meat and few vegetables.