ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on pains arising from nongynecologic abdominal and pelvic viscera. Abdominal, groin, and perineal pain can be of visceral, neuropathic, musculoskeletal, related to cancer or psychogenic origins. Chronic pain localized to the abdomen, groin, and/or perineum can have multiple etiologies ranging from focal sites of inflammation to idiopathic systemic diseases. Pain experienced in the abdomen, groin, and/or perineum may arise from pathology of the nervous system innervating those structures or may originate in the viscera, vascular structures or musculoskeletal-articular stuctures in the region. Other sources of chronic abdominal visceral pain as well as urogenital and rectal pain syndromes producing groin and perineal symptomatology all have correlates with these disorders and diagnostic work-ups and therapies are similar. Chronic pain with abdominal, groin, or perineal localization is a common clinical entity with multiple etiologies both known and unknown. Numerous other painful disorders with abdominal, groin, or perineal symptomatology will then briefly be discussed as “correlates” of the archetypal disorders.
