Salivary cortisol concentrations, stress and quality of life in women with endometriosis and chronic pelvic pain

Karina Friggi Sebe Petrelluzzi, K F S Petrelluzzi, M C Garcia, Márcia Carvalho Garcia, C A Petta, Carlos Alberto Petta, Dora Maria Grassi Kassisse, D M Grassi-Kassisse, R C Spadari-Bratfisch
Stress (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2008 · vol. 11(5) , pp. 390–397 · doi:10.1080/10253890701840610 · PMID:18800310 · W1937111251
article OA: bronze CC0 ⤵ 115 in-corpus citations
📄 Open PDF View on OpenAlex View on PubMed View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-06 ⓘ

Women with endometriosis and chronic pelvic pain exhibited higher perceived stress, poorer quality of life, and lower salivary cortisol concentrations compared to controls.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

The objective of this study was to evaluate the perceived stress index, quality of life, and hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis activity in women with endometriosis and chronic pelvic pain. For the study, 93 women with endometriosis and 82 healthy women volunteered. The visual analogue scale (VAS) (0=no pain; 10=severe pain) was used to determine pain intensity; the perceived stress questionnaire (PSQ) defined stress index, and the health-related quality-of-life (HRQOL)-SF-36 questionnaire was used to evaluate quality of life. Salivary cortisol was measured at 0800, 1600, and 2000 h and the awakening cortisol response was assessed to evaluate the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis activity. The results show that women with endometriosis and chronic pelvic pain of moderate intensity (4.1+/-0.58, mean+/-SEM) have higher levels of perceived stress (0.55+/-0.01 versus 0.42+/-0.01, p<0.05), a poorer quality of life expressed as lower scores for all items of the inventory and hypocortisolism. Lower levels of salivary cortisol were observed in all three samples collected, as well as in the awakening cortisol response, for women with endometriosis (0.19+/-0.09 microg/dl) when compared with controls (0.78+/-0.08 microg/dl, p<0.05 l), and it was independent of pain intensity and Mental health (MH) scores in SF-36. We concluded that women with endometriosis and chronic pelvic pain show low concentrations of salivary cortisol and a high level of perceived stress, associated with a poor quality of life. Whether the hypocortisolism was an adaptive response to the aversive symptoms of the disorder or a feature related to the etiology of endometriosis remains to be elucidated.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Outcome instruments

VAS-pain

Condition tags

mesh:D004715mesh:D017699endometriosischronic_pelvic_pain

MeSH descriptors

Endometriosis Endometriosis Hydrocortisone Pelvic Pain Pelvic Pain Quality of Life Saliva Stress, Physiological Adult Chronic Disease Endometriosis Female Humans Hydrocortisone Hypothalamo-Hypophyseal System Hypothalamo-Hypophyseal System Pelvic Pain Pituitary-Adrenal System Pituitary-Adrenal System Saliva

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

References (39)

Cited by (50)

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-06-04T01:30:01.192114+00:00
openalex
last seen: 2026-06-04T00:00:01.174412+00:00
pubmed
last seen: 2026-05-13T22:14:24.299271+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK