CORE OUTCOME SETS

Chronic Pelvic Pain

 
Chronic Pelvic Pain
 

Core Outcomes for Research in Chronic Pelvic Pain

Chronic pelvic pain is a common condition affecting 15% of women worldwide. It can cause significant symptoms which can interfere with day to day and have a substantial impact on quality of life.

The Core Outcomes Set for Chronic Pelvic Pain project will establish the most important outcomes to measure in future trials for chronic pelvic pain.

 

Opportunity to take part

We are now recruiting a mixture of patients, patient representatives, health professionals and researchers from across the world to participate in two rounds of surveys to identify potential core outcomes. 

The first round of our survey is due to open in May 2023.

Please follow this link to register for the survey.

 
 

Participant information sheets

 

Key Information

  • Published randomised control trials of treatments for chronic pelvic pain use different ways of measuring responses to treatment (outcomes). This prevents the results from trials being compared and combined to produce strong evidence that can be used to base treatment related decisions. This project aims to obtain international consensus on which outcomes should be measured in trials of chronic pelvic pain. These outcomes will subsequently inform an international “core outcome set” for use in all future chronic pelvic pain trials.

  • In this project we aim to obtain a consensus from international key stakeholders such as patients, doctors, researchers, journal editors, industry representatives and policy makers. We will bring the opinions of our key stakeholders together through an online survey to determine which outcomes are relevant and important. These outcomes will be subsequently discussed at a meeting where a final core outcome set will be agreed and applied in future chronic pelvic pain trials.

  • Once a final core outcome set has been agreed , it will then be used by all researchers conducting studies in female chronic pelvic pain (researchers can still add in further outcomes should they wish). If future studies can report standardised outcomes then results from studies can be combined and compared easily to determine which treatments are best.

    Our results will be shared among women with chronic pelvic pain, health professionals and researchers. We intend to present our findings at professional conferences/meetings and publish these in scientific journals. We will distribute lay summaries of our study findings to women with CPP who participated in the study as well to relevant patient organisations using newsletters and social media.

  • This study has been supported by a financial grant from Bayer Plc. Bayer Plc has had no involvement in the development or implementation of the project.