Abstract

"Purpose: With little evidence, the causes of inflammatory and non-inflammatory chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CPPS), which cover a majority of cases of prostatitis syndromes, have not been fully explicated. The mechanisms of these two CPPS may be different. Although the clinical symptoms are expected to be disparate, we compared the clinical symptoms between the two using National Institutes of Health chronic prostatitis symptoms index (NIH-CPSI) over several parameters. Materials and Methods: The chronic pelvic pain syndrome patients (n=256) at our institution between April 2009 and March 2010 were included. After classifying these patients into two groups, the inflammatory CPPS and the non-inflammatory CPPS groups, we compared the two groups in terms of pain or discomfort, urinary symptom, quality of life, prostate volume measured by transrectal ultrasonography (TRUS), prostate specific antigen (PSA) and maximum flow rate (Qmax) difference. Result: There was no statistically significant difference between the two groups in pain or discomfort, urinary symptom, quality of life, prostate volume measured by TRUS, and Qmax difference. However, inflammatory CPPS patients showed meaningfully higher PSA scores than non-inflammatory CPPS patients. No significant difference was observed between patient age and compared among the age groups. Pain or discomfort, urinary symptom, quality of life, prostate volume measured by TRUS, and Qmax difference within each age group were not significantly different between the inflammatory CPPS & non-inflammatory groups. Conclusions: There was no statistically significant difference between the two groups except PSA. It remains unreliable to distinguish inflammatory CPPS from non-inflammatory CPPS based solely on clinical symptoms."

• Keywords: Prostatitis, Manifestations