Pelvic floor muscle training as a treatment for genitourinary syndrome of menopause: A single-arm feasibility study

Effects of Physical Exercise on Sexual Function and Quality of Sexual Life Related to Menopausal Symptoms in Peri- and Postmenopausal Women: A Systematic Review

“…Both of these systematic reviews concluded that caution must be exercised in the interpretation of their results given the methodological limitations of studies dealing with this matter. The results of the studies included in our review indicate that four out of six interventions involving PFMT reported improvements in sexual function, two of those with PFM exercises alone [20,21] and involving healthy subjects, and the other two in combination with other treatments and performed on a population of women with genitourinary syndrome of menopause [30] and dyspareunia [25].…”

“…An improvement in sexual function was also reported. In women with genitourinary syndrome of menopause, there were significant improvements in several sexual function indicators after the combination of PFM physiotherapy treatment and home-based PFM exercises [30]. However, no significant improvement in sexual function was observed after resistance exercises combined with PFMT in healthy women [28] and in women with symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse.…”

“…Some of these benefits (role-emotional, mental health, and mental health component score) were maintained after six months, but only by subjects who underwent the combined strategy intervention. Lastly, Mercier et al [30], after a home-based PFM exercise program combined with a PFM physiotherapy treatment, reported improvements among women with genitourinary syndrome of menopause in the QOL subscale of the ICIQ-VS, as well as in the ASQ total score and in the items that recorded the impact of vaginal dryness and vulvo-vaginal irritation on activities of daily living.…”

“…With a total number of eleven articles under analysis, five out of the eight RCTs were two-armed trials [20,22,23,26], two were three-armed [21,24] and one had four arms [27]. Four RCTs were conducted in Asia (two in Iran, one in China, and one in Thailand) [20][21][22][23], four in America (two in the USA, two in Brazil, and one in Canada) [24,25,[28][29][30] and two in Europe (both in the Netherlands) [25,27]. A total of 1548 women were selected for participation in the 11 studies included in this systematic review.…”

“…All studies involved healthy women except four cases in which subjects suffered from primary breast cancer and treatment-induced menopause [27]; genitourinary syndrome of menopause and stress or mixed urinary incontinence [30]; pelvic organ prolapse [26]; and dyspareunia [25]. Pelvic floor muscle (PFM) exercises, either alone [20,21,25] or combined with resistance exercises [28] or physiotherapy treatment [25,30] were the most widely used type of activity. Other studies employed aerobic exercises alone [23,24] or together with resistance exercises [29] or cognitive-behavioral treatment including relaxation exercises.…”