Effect of the type of urinary incontinence on the quality of life of patients in the public healthcare system in southeastern brazil

Abstract

PURPOSE: To identify the impact of urinary incontinence (UI) on quality of life (QoL), to compare the scores of QoL domains in women with stress urinary incontinence (SUI), overactive bladder (OAB) and mixed incontinence (MUI) and to establish the association between the clinical type of UI and the impact on QoL. METHODS: Data of 181 incontinent women attended at a public hospital were collected regarding age, body mass index (BMI) and co-morbidities. King’s Health Questionnaire (KHQ) was applied and patients were classified into two groups according to the self-assessment of incontinence impact. KHQ scores were compared by the Mann-Whitney test. Depending on their urinary symptoms, women were divided into SUI, OAB and MUI groups and their scores in the KHQ domains were compared by the Kruskal-Wallis and Dunn tests. The odds ratio (OR) of a woman reporting a worse effect of UI on QoL was estimated using the binary logistic model. The control variables were: age, BMI and number of co-morbidities. RESULTS: A significant difference was found between the two groups of self-assessment of UI impact for all KHQ domains. The MUI group showed worse scores than the SUI group for all domains, and OAB group, for limitation of physical and daily activities. There was a significant difference between the odds of the women in the SUI and MUI groups reporting worse effects of UI on QoL (OR=2.9; p=0.02). CONCLUSION: As reported at other reference services, MUI was the most commom type, and urinary loss had a moderate/major impact on QoL, affecting mainly role limitations domain. The adjusted analysis showed that women with MUI had almost three times greater odds of reporting worse impact on QoL than women with SUI.