Pelvic neuropathic pain (differential diagnosis)

Abstract

Summary: Objective: General practitioners, surgeons, neurologists, urologists and gynecologists all encounter patients suffering from neurogenic pelvic pain. Correct management demands knowledge from all above mentioned specialties. The primary goal is to help patients suffering from chronic or acute pelvic pain coupled with functional disorders like dysuria, urgency, dyspareunia, mobility disorders orhypoesthesia. Neurogenic defects are not the most common etiology for either of listed symptoms. However, after exclusion of the more common ones and failure to respond to basic therapeutic methods such as physiotherapy or analgotheraphy doctors tend to mark the illness as idiopathic and incurable. The goal of this review is to show the most common nosological units and a robust diagnostic algorithm to describe the type and level of the damage. Methods: Review of literature using databases Pubmed, Science direct, Medline and sources of the international school of neuropelveology. Conclusion: Over a lifetime, one in seven women will suffer from chronic pelvic pain. Outside of the cases where a clear postoperative etiology is established, the time to make a correct dia gnosis is often long for the unspecific and varied symptomatology. Neuropelveological diagnostic algorithm is demonstrably efficient in shortening the time to diagnosis and more importantly to the treatment.