The Effect of Graded Pelvic Floor Exercises on Women with Stress Incontinence: A Pilot Study

[[abstract]]The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of pelvic floor exercise in treating stress incontinence in residents of long-term care facilities. A repeated measure pre-experimental design was used for this study. Convenience sampling was employed to select 12 subjects who were from four public and private long-term care institutions in the metropolitan Taipei area. Subjects performed graded pelvic floor exercise three times a week for 8 weeks. Data was collected before and after four-week and eight-week programs. Descriptive analysis as well as the X^2 test, Wilcoxon twosample test, Friedman test, median test, sign test, Spearman correlation, and Wilcoxon signed-rank test were used to analyze the data. The results were as follows: (1) There were correlations between incontinence situation variables (including severity, duration and frequency of incontinence) and the effectiveness of exercise, but no correlations of any significance were found between demographic variables and the effectiveness of exercise; (2) after performing pelvic floor exercise, there were significantly less volume and frequency of urine leakage (Friedman test: x^2=22.17, x^2=21.13, p＜.01), with no significant decrease in the frequency of urination; (3) subjects self-reported significant improvement of urine incontinence (Sign test, p＜.01). Further studies on the effectiveness of regularly performing these exercises over longer periods of time and developing less-invasive measures to assess the effectiveness of pelvic floor exercises are recommended