Results of rehabilitation therapy in the treatment of urinary stress incontinence

Abstract

— One hundred consecutive patients were studied because of stress incontinence between 1990 and 1993. All the patients agreed to follow an out-patients combined therapeutic rehabilitation protocol: physiotherapy, biofeedback and FES. The short and medium-term results were correlated with all the studied parameters (personal, obstetric, anamnestic, clinical, instrumental). In this unselected population of patients affected by stress incontinence, the full recovery and/or improvement rates of the short-term rehabilitation therapy amounted to 26 and 73%. Such rates are significantly changed by some parameters: severity and the physiopathologic mechanism of the stress incontinence, high parity rate and/or patients’ age. A more careful selection of patients may help us achieve much better results. However, pelvic floor rehabilitation is an efficacious and conservative therapeutic procedure in the treatment of female urinary stress incontinence.