Treatment for Female Stress Urinary Incontinence

Urinary incontinence (UI) is the complaint of any involuntary leakage of urine. Stress urinary incontinence (SUI) is the complaint of involuntary leakage on effort or exertion, or on sneezing or coughing. The prevalence of female UI is greater than that of male, and the commonest type is SUI. UI has significant impact on the quality of life including physical, mental and social issues. SUI may also lead to withdraw from regular physical exercise and fitness activities that important in the prevention of osteoporosis, coronary heart disease, and so on. The cause of SUI is related to the impairment of pelvic floor muscles (PFM). So far, the effects of intensive pelvic floor muscle training for female SUI were proved in many randomized controlled trials. However, training of accurate contraction of PFM depends on vaginal palpation. The willingness to seek for medical help may be reduced due to being embarrassed with vaginal palpation. Sapsford proposed a concept to treat SUI via transversus abdominis (TrA) that does not need to palpate the vagina. Maybe the new intervention can promote the willingness to seek medical help. However, to date there is no randomized controlled trial comparing the effect of indirect training of the PFM via TrA with either untreated control or other intervention. Therefore, there are two purposes in this study, to compare the effect of indirect training of PFM via TrA with control group and to compare the effect of indirect training of PFM via TrA with PFMT for female SUI.