Abstract
Introduction: Stress urinary incontinence represents a common but strongly underestimated health problem that affects women of all ages and severely downgrades their health related quality of life. The transobturator vaginal tape (TVT-O) approach offers long term success rates, while minimizing complications. In this study, we examined quality of life of patients suffering by stress urinary incontinence and investigated whether TVT-O procedure offers considerable benefits in patient’s quality of life after 5 years of placement. Methods and results: Women with confirmed urodynamic stress urinary incontinence that underwent TVT-O procedure were included in this prospective study. Patient’s quality of life was evaluated by using the Greek version of SF-36 preoperatively and 60 months postoperatively. The outcomes demonstrated that incontinence had significant adverse effect in patient’s quality of life. However, TVT-O procedure offers a safe and efficient treatment, substantially improving both physical and mental dimension of women’s health related quality of life (P>0.05). Discussion: Stress urinary incontinence strongly impairs women’s health related quality of life, limiting their physical activities, social function and causing emotionally imbalance. Insertion of tension free vaginal tape reverses symptoms and significantly improves all health indicators associated with patient’s health related quality of life. In our study, we demonstrate that minimal invasive surgery, by using TVT-O procedure is highly effective, in long term, in improving quality of life of women with stress urinary incontinence.
Highlights
Stress urinary incontinence represents a common but strongly underestimated health problem that affects women of all ages and severely downgrades their health related quality of life
Women with confirmed urodynamic stress urinary incontinence that underwent Tension-free vaginal tape-obturator (TVT-O) procedure were included in this prospective study
We demonstrate that minimal invasive surgery, by using TVT-O procedure is highly effective, in long term, in improving quality of life of women with stress urinary incontinence
Summary
Stress urinary incontinence represents a common but strongly underestimated health problem that affects women of all ages and severely downgrades their health related quality of life. The transobturator vaginal tape (TVT-O) approach offers long term success rates, while minimizing complications. Urinary incontinence (UI) represents an important problem which affects women of all ages [1,2]. Introduction of tension-free vaginal tapes procedures since 1995 when it was first described by Ulmsten et al more than 20 years ago, constituted a revolution in the rapidly changing field of female incontinence treatment [9]. The use of transobturator route to apply tension-free vaginal tape (TVT-O) was first described by Delorme et al In 2001 as a new method of inserting the tape which passes through the obturator foramen, theoretically avoiding some of the complications
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