Is the first day of the bladder diary enough for symptom assessment in women with lower urinary tract symptoms?

Abstract

Introduction:The 3-Day Bladder Diary (3dBD) has good feasibility, reliability and validity for the assessment of Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms (LUTS) in women. This study aims to evaluate the reliability of the first day of the 3dBD (fdBD) in the assessment of the symptoms of women with LUTS. Materials and Methods:An epidemiologic, descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted. Fourteen Functional Urology and Urodynamic Units participated, and one hundred thirty-six women with a mean age (SD) of 55.2 (13.8) years with LUTS filled in the 3dBD. Investigators completed the evaluation sheet based on the interpretation of the three patient-completed sheets. The authors did a centralized reading of the diaries. A descriptive analysis of 3dBD was performed. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to assess the agreement between fdBD and 3dBD global results. ICC<0 indicates no agreement, 0–0.4 poor agreement, 0.4–0.59 moderate agreement, 0.6–0.74 good agreement and >0.74 excellent agreement. Results:One hundred ten women completed the 3dBD. Day-time micturition frequency, nocturia, urgency, urgency urinary incontinence (UUI) and pads showed an excellent concordance (ICC 0.932; 0.883; 0.947; 0.958; 0.961 respectively). Stress urinary incontinence (SUI), fluid intake and 24-hour urine production had a good/excellent concordance (ICC 0.859; 0,884; 0.869 respectively). However, voiding volumes exhibited a moderate level of agreement with wide confidence intervals (day-time 0.730 [0.415-0.886]; night-time 0.770 [0.462-0.889]), which implies a high variability in the fdBD data. Conclusions:fdBD showed good reliability in the assessment of LUTS in women in all parameters except for the voided volume variables.