Journal of Women's Health Care
Open Access

Abstract

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

Dhillon HK, MZain AZ, Quek KF, Singh HJ, Kaur G and Nordin RB

Background: Reports of the prevalence of urinary incontinence (UI) in women seem to vary widely globally. This paper attempts to review the current literature on urinary UI, its prevalence, risk factors and quality of life (QOL) amongst Malaysian women.
Methods: Scopus and Medline search was made to access the databases. Both basic and advance search for articles on female UI among Asian women were sought. Epidemiology, risk factors, urinary symptoms in Asian females, ICIQ-SF questionnaire, BFLUTS questionnaire, QUID questionnaire, King’s Health Questionnaire, prevalence, and QOL were some of the key words used to retrieve these articles. References related to relevant studies were searched manually. Relevant sources were identified from year 2001 to 2015. Observational studies and review articles were included. A total of 295 local and international publications were identified.
Results: A total of nine reports based on the Malaysian population were identified with their sample sizes ranging from 212 to 5502 participants. The 5502 participants were from ten other Asian countries. Documented prevalence in these studies ranged from 9.9% to 44%. Little was documented on the risk factors, types of UI, its effect on QOL or the treatment seeking behavior in these studies.
Conclusions: Information on UI in Malaysian women is incomplete and inconclusive; there appears to be a vital need to conduct a bigger national population based study using a validated standardized symptom-based questionnaire in various local languages with sufficient details to allow grading of UI severity and to accurately estimate the prevalence of UI, current risk factors, QOL and treatment seeking behavior. This will provide better information on the status of the problem, and the evidence documented will contribute towards the Malaysian body of knowledge in urology and clinical practice.