Frequency and severity of chronic scrotal pain in Canadian men presenting to urologists for infertility investigations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Chronic scrotal pain (CSP) may be debilitating in men presenting for treatment for CSP, but we have little information on the frequency and severity of CSP in the men who do not seek care for the CSP. Our objective was to identify the frequency and characteristics of CSP in a population of men presenting for reasons other than CSP to a urology clinic. Methods: Men presenting to a urology clinic for investigation of male infertility (INF) completed a standardized CSP questionnaires if they self-reported having CSP. This prospectively collected database was then retrospectively analyzed. Results: Forty-five of 1,203 (3.7%) of INF patients (mean age 35: range, 24–59), reported having CSP (INF/CSP). Our comparison group was 131 men presenting for investigation of CSP [mean age 43¡À12 (SD) years with a mean duration of CSP of 4.7¡À5.95 years]. On average, men with INF/CSP had less severe and frequent pain than those with CSP, with significantly less pain during “bad” pain episodes (5.2¡À2.2 vs. 7.4¡À2.1, VAS score 0–10, P<0.0001 Student’s t-test), less frequent “bad” pain episodes (23%¡À21% vs. 42%¡À30% of the time, P<0.0001 Student’s t-test) and lower proportion of men who reported having severe pain (VAS score 7–10/10) (4/45 vs. 46/131, P<0.001, chi-squared test). Both groups reported a negative impact of the pain on quality of life (QOL), with 60% and 86% of men with INF/CSP and CSP alone reporting that they would feel ‘mostly dissatisfied’, ‘unhappy’, or ‘terrible’ if they had to continue life with their present scrotal pain symptoms. Conclusions: Clinicians should be aware that CSP is common among men presenting for conditions other than CSP and that even if the pain levels are not “severe”, the chronic pain often has a significant negative impact on QOL.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".