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Medical Author:

Charles Patrick Davis, MD, PhD

Charles Patrick Davis, MD, PhD

Dr. Charles "Pat" Davis, MD, PhD, is a board certified Emergency Medicine doctor who currently practices as a consultant and staff member for hospitals. He has a PhD in Microbiology (UT at Austin), and the MD (Univ. Texas Medical Branch, Galveston). He is a Clinical Professor (retired) in the Division of Emergency Medicine, UT Health Science Center at San Antonio, and has been the Chief of Emergency Medicine at UT Medical Branch and at UTHSCSA with over 250 publications.

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Medical Editor:

Mary Nettleman, MD, MS, MACP

Mary Nettleman, MD, MS, MACP

Mary D. Nettleman, MD, MS, MACP is the Chair of the Department of Medicine at Michigan State University. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt Medical School, and completed her residency in Internal Medicine and a fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Indiana University.

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Outlook

If treated appropriately with antibiotics, epididymitis should be cured and the individual will have an excellent prognosis (outlook).

The pain should improve within 1-3 days; however, swelling may take several days to resolve.

However, complications are possible, including:

• Sterility: If the epididymitis involves both sides and is untreated, sterility may result (rarely, sterility can still occur even with antibiotic treatment).

• Scrotal abscess (an infection)

• Co-infection of the testicle (epididymo-orchitis)

• Sepsis (spread of infection into the bloodstream)

• Fournier gangrene (a severe and life-threatening infection of the scrotal area that kills the cells)

The longer treatment is delayed, the more likely the above complications may develop and thus reduce the individual's outcome to only fair to poor, depending on the severity of the complications.