Overview
Chronic Postsurgical Pain (CPSP) is defined as:
Pain persisting at least three months after surgery (various authors propose thresholds of duration from two to six months).
Pain not present before surgery or that has different characteristics or increased intensity from preoperative pain.
Pain is localized to the surgical site or a referred area.
Other possible causes of the pain are excluded (e.g., cancer recurrence, infection
CPSP occurs in roughly one or two of 10 surgical patients and is intolerable after roughly one of every 100 operations. In a large observational study, 2.2 percent of postoperative patients reported severe CPSP one year after surgery.
The type of surgical procedure influences both the incidence of CPSP (e.g., 35 percent after thoracotomy and breast surgery, 20 percent after knee arthroplasty, and 10 percent after hip arthroplasty) and its intensity (e.g., joint arthroplasty is greater than gynaecological or other visceral operations
Symptoms
The main symptom is that of vaginal pain. This pain can be described as burning or sharp in nature with dull overtones. It may be provoked, i.e. by sexual and/or nonsexual contact, or unprovoked, i.e. spontaneous or mixed (provoked or unprovoked).