BACKGROUND Pelvic floor muscle training is the most commonly recommended physical therapy treatment for women with stress urinary incontinence. It is also sometimes recommended for mixed and, less commonly, urge urinary incontinence. The supervision and content of pelvic floor muscle training programmes are highly variable, and some programmes use additional strategies in an effort to increase ...

BACKGROUND Purpose of the study is to define the role of conventional radiology and MRI in the evaluation of pelvic floor hernias in female pelvic floor disorders. METHODS A MEDLINE and PubMed search was performed for journals before March 2013 with MeSH major terms 'MR Defecography' and 'pelvic floor hernias'. RESULTS The prevalence of pelvic floor hernias at conventional radiology was hig...

Clinical measurement of pelvic floor muscle activity commonly involves techniques that are both physically and psychologically invasive. This study investigated transabdominal application of ultrasound to measure pelvic floor muscle action. The specific aims were to establish the face validity of ultrasound measures of displacement of the posterior bladder wall as a reflection of pelvic floor m...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of multimodal supervised physiotherapy programs with the absence of treatment among women with persistent postnatal stress urinary incontinence. METHODS This was a single-blind randomized controlled trial. Sixty-four women with stress urinary incontinence were randomly assigned to 8 weeks of either multimodal pelvic floor rehabi...

Methods One hundred and three nulliparous women attending the routine ultrasound scan at 18 weeks of pregnancy were recruited to the study. Background variables and continence status were registered in a structured interview. Women reporting urinary incontinence once per week or more during the last month were categorised as incontinent. All women were instructed in pelvic floor anatomy and how...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to determine if two different whole body vibration, sinusoidal vibration (SV) and stochastic resonance vibration (SRV), using various intensities lead to a reactive activation of pelvic floor muscles. STUDY DESIGN We compared the pelvic floor muscle response of a healthy control group with that of a post partum group with weakened pelvic floor contraction. ...

The pelvic floor musculature plays an important role in behaviors such as defecation, micturition, mating behavior, and vomiting. A recent positron emission tomography (PET) study revealed that structures belonging to the emotional motor system are involved in the control of the pelvic floor during micturition. However, there also exist brain structures involved in the voluntary motor control o...

[Purpose] This review article is designed to expose physiotherapists to a physiotherapy assessment of stress urinary incontinence (SUI) and the treatment and possibly preventive roles that they might play for women with SUI. Specifically, the goal of this article is to provide an understanding of pelvic floor muscle function and the implications that this function has for physiotherapy treatmen...