• Nicolas Bourdel, João Alves, Gisele Pickering, Irina Ramilo, Horace Roman, and Michel Canis.
• Department of Gynecologic Surgery, CHU Estaing Clermont Ferrand, 63058 Clermont Ferrand Cedex 1, France Faculté de medicine, ISIT - Université d'Auvergne, Place Henri Dunant, 63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France nicolas.bourdel@gmail.com.
• Hum. Reprod. Update. 2015 Jan 1;21(1):136-52.

BackgroundNumerous studies concerning endometriosis and pain have been reported. However, there is no consensus on the best method to evaluate pain in endometriosis and many scales have been used. Moreover, there are only a few descriptions of minimal clinically important differences after treatment (MCID) to evaluate variations in pain. In our study, we aim to identify pain scales used in endometriosis pain treatment, to address their strong and weak points and to define which would be the ideal scale to help clinicians and researchers to evaluate endometriosis-related pain.MethodsA search of the MEDLINE and EMBASE databases was carried out for publications in English, French or Portuguese from 1980 to December 2012, for the words: endometriosis, treatment, pain. Studies were selected if they studied an endometriosis treatment and a pain scale was specified. A quantitative and a qualitative analysis of each scale was performed to define strong and weak points of each scale (systematic registration number: CRD42013005336).ResultsA total of 736 publications were identified. After excluding duplications and applying inclusion criteria 258 studies remained. We found that the visual analog scale (VAS) is the most frequently used scale. Both VAS and the numerical rating scale (NRS) show a good balance between strong and weak points in comparison with others such as the Biberoglu and Behrman scale. Concerning MCID, only VAS, NRS and Brief Pain Inventory scales have reported MCID and, among these, only VAS MCID has been studied in endometriosis patients (VAS MCID = 10 mm). Adding the Clinical Global Impression score (CGI) to the pain scale allows calculation of the MCID.ConclusionsWhen using pain scales their strengths and weaknesses must be known and included in the analysis. VAS is the most frequently used pain scale and, together with NRS, seems the best adapted for endometriosis pain measurement. The use of VAS or NRS for each type of typical pain related to endometriosis (dysmenorrhea, deep dyspareunia and non-menstrual chronic pelvic pain), combined with the CGI and a quality-of-life scale will provide both clinicians and researchers with tools to evaluate treatment response.© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

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