Management of chronic primary pelvic pain syndromes.

Management of chronic pelvic pain remains a huge challenge for care providers and a major burden for health care systems. Treating chronic pain that has no obvious cause warrants an understanding of the difficulties in managing these conditions. Chronic pain has recently been accepted as a disease in its own right by the World Health Organisation (WHO), with chronic pain without obvious cause being classified as chronic primary pain. Despite innumerable treatments that have been proposed and tried so far for chronic pelvic pain, unimodal therapeutic options are mostly unsuccessful, especially in non-selected individuals. In contrast, individualised multimodal management of chronic pelvic pain seems the most promising approach and may lead to an acceptable situation for a large proportion of patients. In this review, the interdisciplinary and interprofessional European Association of Urology (EAU) Chronic Pelvic Pain Guideline Group gives a contemporary overview of the most important concepts to successfully diagnose and treat this challenging disease.