Yoga for treating urinary incontinence in women

• Published in: Cochrane database of systematic reviews 2019-02, Vol.2 (2), p.CD012668
• Main Authors: Wieland, L Susan, Shrestha, Nipun, Lassi, Zohra S, Panda, Sougata, Chiaramonte, Delia, Skoetz, Nicole
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Aged; Complementary & alternative medicine; Female; Humans; Middle Aged; Mindfulness - methods; Stress, Psychological - therapy; Treatment Outcome; Urinary incontinence (including enuresis); Urinary Incontinence, Stress - therapy; Urinary Incontinence, Urge - therapy; Urology; Waiting Lists; Yoga; Young Adult
• ISSN: 1469-493X; 1469-493X
• DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD012668.pub2

Urinary incontinence in women is associated with poor quality of life and difficulties in social, psychological and sexual functioning. The condition may affect up to 15% of middle-aged or older women in the general population. Conservative treatments such as lifestyle interventions, bladder training and pelvic floor muscle training (used either alone or in combination with other interventions) are the initial approaches to the management of urinary incontinence. Many women are interested in additional treatments such as yoga, a system of philosophy, lifestyle and physical practice that originated in ancient India. To assess the effects of yoga for treating urinary incontinence in women. We searched the Cochrane Incontinence and Cochrane Complementary Medicine Specialised Registers. We searched the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (WHO ICTRP) and ClinicalTrials.gov to identify any ongoing or unpublished studies. We handsearched Proceedings of the International Congress on Complementary Medicine Research and the European Congress for Integrative Medicine. We searched the NHS Economic Evaluation Database for economic studies, and supplemented this search with searches for economics studies in MEDLINE and Embase from 2015 onwards. Database searches are up-to-date as of 21 June 2018. Randomised controlled trials in women diagnosed with urinary incontinence in which one group was allocated to treatment with yoga. Two review authors independently screened titles and abstracts of all retrieved articles, selected studies for inclusion, extracted data, assessed risk of bias and evaluated the certainty of the evidence for each reported outcome. Any disagreements were resolved by consensus. We planned to combine clinically comparable studies in Review Manager 5 using random-effects meta-analysis and to carry out sensitivity and subgroup analyses. We planned to create a table listing economic studies on yoga for incontinence but not carry out any analyses on these studies. We included two studies (involving a total of 49 women). Each study compared yoga to a different comparator, therefore we were unable to combine the data in a meta-analysis. A third study that has been completed but not yet fully reported is awaiting assessment.One included study was a six-week study comparing yoga to a waiting list in 19 women with either urgency urinary incontinence or stress urinary incontinence. We judged the certainty of the evidence for