Authors (including presenting author) :
Cheuk LW
Affiliation :
Department of Physiotherapy, Tsan Yuk Hospital, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong
Introduction :
Urinary incontinence (UI) has long been a common problem affecting people all over the world. In HK, increasing prevalence of women experiencing stress incontinence has been noticed. Meanwhile, UI is more common in female than male.
Pelvic Floor Muscle training (PFMT) has been well-known as the first-line and a cost-effective treatment of incontinence issue. According to the International Consultation on Incontinence 2017, grade A recommendation has been given to supervised PFMT as first-line conservative treatment to women with UI.
Therefore, a supervised PFMT program (ASAP Program) was established. In the program, physiotherapists assess patient’s pelvic floor muscles; perform subjective and objective physical assessments of related musculoskeletal body parts such as hip and back regions, so as to find out problems and provide focused treatments accordingly. Treatment examples include making use of piston coordination of diaphragmatic breathing to enhance pelvic floor muscles control, tailoring PFMT to patients’ specific functional needs, training muscles to provide additional support to pelvic floor muscles, etc.
In short, in order to alleviate their problems effectively and thoroughly, scaling our program according to patients’ abilities and treating patient as a whole are our focus.
Objectives :
To evaluate the effectiveness of ASAP program
Methodology :
From September 2020 to November 2021, 20 female patients with urinary symptoms completed the ASAP program in Tsan Yuk Hospital Physiotherapy Out-patient Department. Urinary distress Inventory – short form (UDI-6) and Incontinence Impact Questionnaire – short form (IIQ-7) were used to evaluate patients’ change in severity of urinary symptoms and quality of life. Both questionnaires are reliable & valid in assessing impact of UI in Chinese women (Chan et.al, 2010). They completed questionnaires in both initial and last sessions. Data has been used for statistical analysis by SPSS software.
Result & Outcome :
In average 4.8 sessions attended, statistically significant reduction of scores of UDI-6 (p = 0.002) and IIQ-7 (p = 0.007) have been noted when comparing of last session to the scores in initial session. In other words, after finishing ASAP program, patients are able to reduce negative impacts of urinary symptoms and improve quality of life. In the items of sneezing and coughing in UDI-6 and managing household activities; enjoying social activities in IIQ-7, great satisfaction with obvious reduction of scores is noted.
Conclusion
ASAP program is able to show positive impacts to patients with urinary symptoms.
