Interstitial Cystitis/Bladder Pain Syndrome Patient Phenotyping

In April of 2025, the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine hosted a Global Consensus meeting on IC/BPS in Winston-Salem, NC. The goal of this meeting was to establish global consensus regarding diagnostic criteria, phenotyping, treatment outcome assessment, and etiopathology in interstitial cystitis/bladder pain syndrome (IC/BPS). Our sub-committee was tasked with developing a consensus document on patient phenotyping in IC/BPS.

Narrative review.

Patients with IC/BPS populate broad groups that have been characterized as having a bladder-focused disease phenotype (bladder-centric), a widespread pain and symptoms phenotype (systemic), or by other variable phenotypes including those with myofascial pelvic pain. In this review, we discuss the published evidence supporting each of these patient phenotypic groups.

Future clinical trials and treatment development in IC/BPS should include patient phenotyping efforts with, at minimum, a focus on stratification into bladder-centric vs systemic and efforts to refine discriminative thresholds (cut-off points) that may influence differential treatment outcomes. It is important to continue to investigate the importance of patient phenotypes on treatment strategy selection, outcomes, and our understanding of the underlying pathophysiology for this disease spectrum.

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