Epidemiology of Chronic Pelvic Pain

This encyclopedia chapter reviews how chronic pelvic pain (CPP) is defined and studied in research, focusing on commonly used inclusion criteria such as recurrent or constant lower abdominal pain lasting at least six months, while explicitly excluding pain only related to dysmenorrhea, dyspareunia, pregnancy, or malignancy. It also compares alternative definitions, including chronic pelvic pain without obvious pathology (CPPWOP), noting a caveat that CPP definitions may carry assumptions about pain causality and may not align with clinical experience and the literature. The chapter frames the implication of these definitional differences for interpreting and comparing epidemiologic findings across studies. Relevance to endometriosis: the chapter’s discussion of menstrual symptoms in women with pelvic endometriosis (citing Mahmood et al.) is included within its broader overview of CPP epidemiology and related symptom patterns, though the chapter’s main focus is on CPP definitions and epidemiologic framing rather than endometriosis specifically.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works