As many as one in four women suffer from chronic pelvic pain. Pudendal neuralgia (PN) is a condition in which there is pain in the lower central pelvic regions due to the pudendal nerve.
Symptoms can include pelvic pain, sexual dysfunction, and difficulty with urination. People who suffer from PN may also have difficulty with defecation and a feeling that a foreign object may be in the body. Pain may be worse upon sitting and less when standing or laying down.
PN can be triggered by bicycling, squatting exercise, direct falls on the tailbone, repeated vaginal infections and chronic constipation. The pain could be a stinging, burning, stabbing or cramping sensation.
The option to freeze the pudendal nerve may be bringing relief to millions of women who didn’t find relief from steroid injections or other treatment for pudendal neuralgia. Dr. J. David Prologo, an interventional radiologist at the Emory School of Medicine had been freezing nerve pain for years, but was quite hesitant to use the same technique on the pudendal nerve.
He just finished a study freezing dorsal penile nerves for premature ejaculation when a female patient asked if he would perform the procedure on her to stop her PN symptoms. After consulting colleagues in urology and gynecology and researching current treatments for PN, he decided to go forward with the procedure.
Dr. Prologo says so far, 95% of the women he has treated have said that their pain is completely gone and 60% of them have not experienced any side-effects.
