Efficacy of pelvic floor muscle exercises in women with stress, urge, and mixed urinary incontinence

OBJECTIVES: Our purpose was (1) to evaluate the efficacy on an intent-to-treat basis of a 3-month course of pelvic floor muscle exercises as first-line therapy for urinary incontinence in consecutive women seen in a tertiary care center with stress, urge, and mixed urinary incontinence and (2) to evaluate whether a specially designed audiotape improves compliance and efficacy of the exercises. STUDY DESIGN: A prospective randomized trial was conducted with 71 women seen for treatment of urinary incontinence in two tertiary care center referral clinics (in the departments of gynecology and urology). The primary outcome measure was the number of incontinent episodes, as documented with a 3-day voiding diary, Statistical analysis included t tests and Wilcoxon signed-ranks test, as appropriate. A value of p less than or equal to 0.05 was considered significant. RESULTS: Forty-four percent of ail enrollees had a greater than or equal to 50% improvement in the number of incontinent episodes per day. This increased to 56% of enrollees who completed the treatment course. For all enrollees the mean number of incontinent episodes per day decreased from 2.6 to 1.7 for genuine stress incontinence, from 3.5 to 2.3 for detrusor instability, and from 3.9 to 3.2 for mixed incontinence, For enrollees who completed the 3-month course the mean number of incontinent episodes per day decreased from 2.5 to 1.4 for genuine stress incontinence, from 2.8 to 0.5 for detrusor instability, and from 3.0 to 1.7 for mixed incontinence, Six months after completing the course of exercises approximately one third of all enrollees reported that they continued to note good or excellent improvement and desired no further treatment. There was no difference in outcome measures and no difference in compliance between the women who exercised with the aid of the audiotape and those who exercised according to our usual office routine (p > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: One third of all participants remained improved to the patient's satisfaction 6 months after completion of a risk-free, inexpensive, simply provided therapy. Our audiotape did not improve our success rate or decrease the dropout rate. In this study the exercises were equally effective for all three urodynamic diagnoses. Inexpensive methods that could be used by primary care providers to improve the success rate of this therapy merits further attention.