Effect of Psychotherapy Interventions on Endometriosis Pain: A Narrative Review Study

Abstract

Endometriosis is one of the most common diseases in women of childbearing age, which is associated with debilitating pain and poor mental health.Therefore, the aim of this review study was to investigate the effect of psychotherapy interventions on endometriosis pain. A narrative review methodology using keywords determined by the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus was adopted in this study. For this purpose, the databases of ScienceDirect, Scientific Information Database (SID), Google Scholar, scopus, and PubMed were searched by means of key terms including endometriosis, Dysmenorrhea, Dyspareunia, Chronic pelvic pain, and Psychotherapy interventions in English and Persian from 2000 to 2020. Inclusion criteria included all RCT articles related to psychotherapy or mind-body interventions were effective on endometriosis pain.Results: In this study, 390 clinical trials were examined. After review, 12 articles were used for writing and the rest were excluded from the study. Interventions included yoga, mindfulness, relaxation practice, cognitive-behavioral therapy with physiotherapy, Chinese medicine with psychotherapy, somatosensory, and biofeedback. In these studies, the intensity of pain in the intervention group was lower than in the control group.Conclusion: Although these studies have shown that psychotherapy can be used as adjunctive therapy in addition to the main treatment for endometriosis pain relief, since the number of studies performed was very limited, more studies with higher levels of evidence are needed. More certainty recommended the use of these methods in the clinic. Therefore, definitive conclusions cannot be drawn about the effectiveness of psychotherapy interventions.