Research in Brief

Abstract

Bowel training and improving defecation posture can benefit patients with dementia who are suffering from chronic constipation, improving their mental health and reducing the burden on care givers, new research suggests. Tomoyoshi Naito and colleagues randomly assigned patients to receive either bowel training and a defecation posture intervention (n=14) or general care (n=16). At 8 weeks, the mean number of complete spontaneous bowel movements per week increased from 0·53 to 1·58 movements in the intervention group whilst decreasing from 0·56 to 0·43 movements in the general care group (pinteraction<0·001).