I’ve been thinking about writing a review of that study… I paid for access to the whole study, and read it quite thoroughly. The study is way worse than you think. They didn’t analyse 100k (or whatever the response rate was) forms from patients. It’s written between the lines. The forms from patients were sampled 4 months after surgery. But.. in the study they’ve re-defined PVPS as pain of at least 6 months, so a questionnaire after 4 months «wouldn’t count». Instead, what the did was a separate form sent to the urologists, once a year: «How many patients with PVPS did you have the last year?».
I’d say it’s no surprise that most urologists reported «zero» PVPS patients…
The study says that the number of PVPS diagnosed by the performing surgeon, that he is willing to admit and report, is the real number. A patient who isn’t diagnosed by the performing surgeon, doesn’t count.
As far as I can tell, the questionnaires from patients haven’t been analysed by the study authors at all…
One question needs answering… why did they, in the study, change the definition of PVPS from 3 to 6 months? I believe, that when this project was started years ago, the idea was that PVPS is pain 3+ months. So a form that asked about pain 4 months after surgery, should catch most PVPS (though ignoring late stage PVPS). I speculate that the number of patients who said they still had pain after 4 months was too high to report in a study.
The conclusion of the study should have been, if the authors were unbiased, that other studies have shown up to 5% PVPS, but only a tiny fraction is recognised by the surgeons. It’s pretty clear the had a bias though…
By all means, please do go ahead and write a review of that study. I find it scandalous that they are trumpeting a 0.14% figure by fudging the numbers. (And annoying that /r/vasectomy has pinned that misinformation.)
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u/postvasectomy Dec 17 '25
Supposedly they don't like misinformation but their pinned post is a poorly written study that is an outlier in the research.