A First Urological Approach to the Genitourinary Manifestations of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. Systematic Review

Multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) is a complex disease with multiorgan manifestations, some of which are still poorly understood, such as genitourinary manifestations. The objective of this article is to review these genitourinary manifestations.

A retrospective descriptive study on the genitourinary manifestations described in patients with multiple chemical sensitivity is performed, based on a systematic review of the literature between February 1956 and December 2020, consulting the Medline/PubMed database and the Google search engine. Descriptive statistics of the variables studied were performed with frequency and percentage for qualitative variables and median and range (minimum-maximum value) for quantitative variables.

We reviewed the originals or abstracts of 3450 articles on MCS, including 461 on symptoms (13.3%) and selecting 40 (1.1%) that referred to genitourinary pathologies or symptoms and corresponded to 19 reviews, 14 articles on case reports (11 clinical cases and 3 series), 5 books with case reports, 1 consensus document and 1 update. The number of patients with MCS studied in these 40 articles was 4556 of whom 303 presented genitourinary symptoms (6.6%), and corresponded to 277 women (91.4%) and 27 men (8.6%) with a mean age of 39.4 years, range (7-82 years). There were 119 different genitourinary symptoms or pathologies with 170 citations which in frequency were 77 for gynecological symptoms (45.3%) in 28 publications (70%), 62 for urological symptoms (36.5%) in 29 publications (72.5%), 18 for sexological symptoms (10.6%) in 8 publications (20%) and 13 for andrological symptoms (7.6%) in 5 publications (12.5%).

Genitourinary manifestations of MCS are rare and predominantly in women. They constitute a genitourinary syndrome including gynecological, urological, sexological and andrological symptoms. Until today there has been no study of these symptoms in the medical literature.