Discomfort in Your Scrotum Could Signal Epididymitis

Just the idea of testicular pain gives most men the shivers. While avoiding that type of pain most often comes down to protecting against a direct hit, there’s another type of pain that’s a little trickier — pain in your scrotum caused by epididymitis.

Each year in the United States, about 600,000 males encounter epididymitis, which can lead to either acute or chronic scrotal pain.

As experts in urology and men's health, Dr. Robert J. Cornell and our team want to take a moment to review epididymitis and what you should do when faced with this pain in your scrotum.

How epididymitis develops

To understand epididymitis, it's helpful to take a quick dive into male reproductive anatomy. Just below your penis is your scrotum, which is the loose sac that houses your testicles. Your testicles produce sperm and store it in coiled tubes that are located behind each testicle. These tubes are called epididymides, which is the plural term for epididymis.

When the suffix -itis is attached to a word, it means inflammation, which is the case with epididymitis. There’s inflammation in the coiled tube that stores your sperm.

This inflammation is most often a result of a sexually transmitted infection, typically chlamydia or gonorrhea, which explains why most cases of acute epididymitis occur in men between the ages of 20 and 39.

That said, epididymitis can develop on the heels of other bacterial infections, such as E. coli infection, and rarely, as a result of tuberculosis.

Signs of epididymitis

There are two types of epididymitis: acute and chronic. For acute epididymitis, symptoms typically develop quickly and include:

Pain in the scrotum — on one or both sides
Groin pain
Swelling, tenderness, and redness in the scrotum
Fever and chills
Painful urination
Blood in the semen

With chronic epididymitis, the symptoms are typically less severe than the acute version, and they’re mainly confined to ongoing discomfort in your scrotum. This discomfort can also ebb and flow and eventually fade away.

Getting relief from epididymitis

To confirm that you have epididymitis, we run a few tests to check for the presence of a bacterial infection. The good news is that if we determine that you have acute epididymitis, a course of antibiotics is usually sufficient to clear up the problem and the pain in your scrotum.

If you have chronic epididymitis and it doesn't respond to antibiotics, in most cases you can manage the discomfort with anti-inflammatory medications and wait for the issue to go away on its own. In rare cases, chronic epididymitis can persist, and we can explore other options, such as surgically removing the epididymis.

In either case, there are also steps you can take at home to help with the scrotal pain, such as hot and cold therapies.

The key to moving past the pain in your scrotum is to seek our help at your earliest convenience. To get that ball rolling, please contact our office in Houston, Texas, to schedule an appointment.