OBJECTIVE
To examine baseline clinical and psychosocial characteristics that predict 12- month symptom change in men and women with urologic chronic pelvic pain syndromes (UCPPS).
METHODS
221 female and 176 male UCPPS patients were recruited from 6 academic medical centers in the United States and evaluated at baseline with a comprehensive battery of symptom, psychosocial, and illness-impact measures. Based on biweekly symptom reports, a functional clustering procedure classified participantâs outcome as worse, stable, or improved on pain and urinary symptom severity. Cumulative logistic modeling was used to examine individual predictors associated with symptom change as well as multiple predictor combinations and interactions.
RESULTS
About 60% of participants had stable symptoms with smaller numbers (13% to 22%) showing clear symptom worsening or improvement. For both pain and urinary outcomes the extent of widespread pain, amount of non-urological symptoms and poorer overall health were predictive of worsening outcomes. Anxiety, depression and general mental health were not significant predictors of outcomes, but pain catastrophizing and self-reported stress were associated with pain outcome. Prediction models did not differ between men and women and for the most part were independent of symptom duration and age.
CONCLUSION
These results demonstrate for the first time in a large multisite prospective study that presence of widespread pain, non-urological symptoms and poorer general health are risk factors for poorer pain and urinary outcomes in both men and women. The results point to the importance of broad based assessment in UCPPS and future studies of mechanisms that underlie these findings.