The impact of urinary stress incontinence in young and middle-age women practising recreational sports activity: an epidemiological study

Abstract

Female UI affects a significant proportion of young women practising non-competitive sports activity; it can cause abandonment of the sport or limitation of its practice.

Incontinence[A1]: Physical Activity as a Supporting Preventive Approach

“…According to studies, nearly 20% females give up (Nygaard et al, 1990) or limit their favorite sports and physical activities due to urinary incontinence. (Salvatore et al, 2009). A longitudinal study on female health (Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health-(ALSWH) reported that 27% females who practiced physical exercises showed urinary incontinence symptoms(> 40%were middle aged women and 16% were young or elderly); a percentage which supports previously discussed studies.…”

“…According to the authors, the highest incidence of disengagement was among ≥ to 48 year-old women. Some authors consider that this might be even higher among women in the post menopause (Eliasson et al, 2002;Salvatore et al, 2009). Furthermore, the greater the concerns towards incontinence during exercise performances, the higher the frequency of urinary leaking episodes (Fultz et al, 2003) leading to an increase in giving up physical activities.…”

“…This last strategy means that exercises which might facilitate urinary leaking (jumping, running) are avoided, and these women start to practice low impact sports, such as walking, biking and swimming (Nygaard et al, 1990;Thyssen et al, 2002). Besides these strategies, women studied by Salvatore et al, (2009) chose exercises to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles as a way to prevent incontinence during physical activities. These "adaptation" strategies, however, did not seem to be effective enough to prevent that they quit exercising.…”

“…Aerobic exercises ranked highest in complaints (42%), followed by running (35%), weight-lifting (18%), jogging (21%), biking (8%), swimming (5 %) and lastly, golf (3%). Salvatore et al, (2009) recently studied 679 female soldiers aiming to check urinary incontinence prevalence during recreational activities. The authors reported that stress urinary incontinence was detected in 14.9% of the subjects; out of this total, 31.7% complained about incontinence during sports practice and 10.4% considered their incontinence severe enough to limit or discourage their activities.…”

Prevalence and Risk Factors of Urinary Incontinence and its Impact on the Quality of Life and Treatment Seeking Behavior among Malaysian Women: A Review

“…The prevalence increases at around the age of 50 years [33,[38][39][40], especially around the age of menopause [36,41,42]. It then appears to remain stable until the age of 65 years [35,43], after which it starts to increase [43][44][45][46]. Differences in ethnicity have also been associated with types of UI.…”