Clinical phenotyping

While symptoms clusters are practical groupings helpful to elucidate disease causes and suggesting treatment options, clinical phenotyping is supposed to be a more precise indication of underlying genetical differences. An attempt to phenotype CPPS sufferers have been made by Shoskes et al (2009) (1-2). In my opinion their approach is more like a mix of symptom clusters, select clinical findings and co-morbidities. They suggest six groups: urologic (essentialy the micturition & genito-urinary symptom clusters), psychosocial (more or less sickness behavior), organ specific (clinical findings about the prostate and ejaculate), infection (clinical findings about bacteria), neurological/systemic (essentially the remaining symptom clusters in my previous posts) and muscle tenderness. Although useful I am of the opinion that their categories are a bit too rough and disparate to be useful for research, but they may be helpful in improving the treatment of patients.

And an evaluation just agreed with me. The author concluded that "a weak or lacking correlation with the studied clinical parameters suggest that further development is required".(3)

Other researchers (Anderson et al, and Dimitrakov et al) have focused on profiling of HPA function and hormonal testing, both of which will be discussed under the findings chapters.

Updated 2009-09-04
Andra bloggar om CPPS, kroniskt bäckenbottensmärtsyndrom, kronisk abakteriell prostatit, NIHIIIb, klinisk fenotypning
_____________
(1) Shoskes DA, Nickel JC, Rackley RR, Pontari MA. Clinical phenotyping in CP/CPPS and IC: a management strategy for urologic chronic pelvic pain syndromes. Prostate Cancer Prostatic Dis 2008, 7pp.
(2) Shoskes DA, Nickel JC, Dolinga R, Prots D. Clinical phenotyping in CP/CPPS and correlation with symptom severity. Urology 73(3):538-542, 2009.
(3) Hedelin HH. Evaluation of a modification of the UPOINT clinical phenotype system for the CPPS. Scand J Urol Nephrol 9:1-4, aug 2009 (epub ahead of print).