Pelvic Pain: Causes, Symptoms and Treatments

Chronic pelvic pain is defined as non-menstrual or noncyclic pelvic pain with duration of at least 6 months, sufficiently intense to interfere with habitual activities requiring treatment. Chronic pelvic pain was related for the first time in 1883 by Lawson Tait, a gynecologist that observing women who stayed sitting at the piano a lot of time had symptoms similar to that assigned nowadays to chronic pelvic pain, since then, the interest to study this disease comes increasing.

Despite of this, are great difficulties in establishing the primary cause of chronic pelvic pain and consequently in proposing adequate treatment. This occurs mainly because chronic pelvic pain involves a complex interaction between the gastrointestinal, urinary, gynecologic, musculoskeletal, neurologic and endocrine systems. The estimated prevalence of chronic pelvic pain is 3.8% among women aged 15–73 years, ranging from 14% to 24% between women in reproductive age. About 60% of these women never receive a specific diagnosis and 20% never undergo any investigation to elucidate the cause of pain. In addition, almost 40% of women who are seen at primary care units complain of pelvic pain, which accounts for 40–50% of gynecological laparoscopies, 10% of gynecological visits and approximately 12% of hysterectomies. Additionally, chronic pelvic pain involves direct and indirect costs exceeding 40 billion dollars a year only in United States. Despite of this, is still little what is known about the physiopathology, prevalence, etiology and treatment of chronic pelvic pain. Therefore this book comes to fill a space required within the scientific literature describing and analyzing important concepts about chronic pelvic pain, and undoubtedly will contribute to the spread of the known and the improvement of research about the disease.

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