Evaluation of urinary incontinence among individiuals aged 65 and over

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate urinary incontinence prevalence, identify the factors that affect urinary incontinence, individuals with urinary incontinence approaches, perspectives and to investigate the conditions that influence the quality of life among individuals 65 years and older that admitted to the Akdeniz University Hospital outpatient clinics during the period of 6 months due to any health problem. Methods: Our study was designed as descriptive-cross sectional. 431 volunteers who agreed to participate in the study, after obtaining their informed consent was included. The study was performed by 6 research assistans who filled the face to face questionnaires. SPSS 22.0 software package was used for statistical analysis; for all comparisons p <0.05 was considered statistically significant. It was investigated whether the distribution of the variables according to a normal distribution was proper with Kolmogorov, Smirnov and Shapiro Wilk tests. T-test, One-Way ANOVA. In the absence of assumptions provided, "Mann-Whitney U", "Wilcoxon", "Kruskall Wallis" and Pearson's chi-square tests was used in comparison. Results: In this study, there has been reached a total of 431 patients aged 65 and over. The average age of the patients was 71,65 and the majority of them was male 53,6%. The majority of the patients had 'middle income' 93% and 36,2% had primary school graduation; In our study it was found that urinary incontinence prevalence was 27%. 41.5% of female and 15.2% of male participants were identified to have urinary incontinence problem. It was found that urinary incontinence was more frequent at females that had a recurrent urinary tract infection complains compared to female patients that did not suffer from recurrent urinary tract infection (p=0.003). It was found that the age of men that suffered from urinary incontinence was higher than the males that had no urinary incontinence complains (p=0.002). It was found that working males suffer less from urinary incontinence compared to those that did not work (p=0.007). It was found that urinary incontinence was more frequent at males that had a benign prostatic hyperplasia compared to male patients that did not suffer from benign prostatic hyperplasia (p=0.003). Conclusion: Although urinary incontinence is a common condition among elders, family physicians are not adequately involved in its management. Among the reasons for this is that the majority of patients consider urinary incontinence as a natural process of ageing or because they are embarrassed to talk about it and it is not routinely questioned by family physicians. Urinary incontinence questioning as a component of a comprehensive geriatric assessment in elderly can assist in diagnosis of these patients. Family physicians as a member of multidisciplinary team can play an important role in the management of urinary incontinence. Key Words: Urinary Incontinence, Elderly, Family Medicine, Primary Care