Are pelvic adhesions associated with pain, physical, emotional and functional characteristics of women presenting with chronic pelvic pain? A cluster analysis.

Background: Chronic pelvic pain is a debilitating condition. It is unknown if there is a clinical phenotype for adhesive disorders. This study aimed to determine if the presence or absence, nature, severity and extent of adhesions correlated with demographic and patient reported clinical characteristics of women presenting with CPP.

Methods: Women undergoing a laparoscopy for the investigation of chronic pelvic pain were recruited prospectively; their pain and phenotypic characteristics were entered into a hierarchical cluster analysis. The groups with differing baseline clinical and operative characteristics in terms of adhesions involvement were analyzed.

Results: Sixty two women were recruited where 37 had adhesions. A low correlation was found between women's reported current pain scores and that of most severe (r = 0.34) or average pain experienced (r = 0.44) in the last 6 months. Three main groups of women with CPP were identified: Cluster 1 (n = 35) had moderate severity of pain, with poor average and present pain intensity; Cluster 2 (n = 14) had a long duration of symptoms/diagnosis, the worst current pain and worst physical, emotional and social functions; Cluster 3 (n = 11) had the shortest duration of pain and showed the best evidence of coping with low (good) physical, social and emotional scores. This cluster also had the highest proportion of women with adhesions (82%) compared to 51% in Cluster 1 and 71% in Cluster 2.

Conclusions: In this study, we found that there is little or no correlation between patient-reported pain, physical, emotional and functional characteristics scores with the presence or absence of intra-abdominal/pelvic adhesions found during investigative laparoscopy. Most women who had adhesions had the lowest reported current pain scores.