The purpose of this study was to help the women with stress urinary incontinence lead more comfortable life, by letting them to do pelvic muscle exercise and to learn by direct experience the effect that urinary incontinence is controlled. The research design was a one-group pretest-posttest design. The subjects were 16 middle-aged women(over 38) with stress urinary incontinence. The study was conducted from August 1, to October 11, 1999. Women trained themselves for muscular strength and endurance, every the other day for each exercise for six weeks at home(that means each exercise for more than three days a week) in the pelvic muscle exercise program which was developed by Dougherty et al., and filled out exercise participation card every week. They visited laboratory once a week to get visual feedback, by means of Perineometer, of how the pelvic muscle exercise was going on. Stress Urinary Incontinence Scale that Lee, Young-Sook revised and supplemented Hendrickson's original scale was used for measuring the frequency and situation scores of urinary incontinence, "30 minute pad test" was carried out for measuring the amount of urinary incontinence, and Perineometer was used for measuring maximum vaginal contraction pressure. Percentage, mean, standard deviation and Wilcoxon signed ranks test were used for data analysis by means of SPSS/PC+ WIN 9.0 program. The results were summarized as follows: The hypothesis 1 that after carrying out pelvic muscle exercise program on women with stress urinary incontinence, the weekly degree of urinary incontinence would reduce compared to before the exercise was supported. The hypothesis 1-1 that after carrying out pelvic muscle exercise program on women with stress urinary incontinence, the weekly frequency of urinary incontinence would reduce compared to before the exercise was supported (p=.003). The hypothesis 1-2 that after carrying out pelvic muscle exercise program on women with stress urinary incontinence, the situation scores of urinary incontinence would reduce compared to before the exercise was supported(p=.044). The hypothesis 2 that after carrying out pelvic muscle exercise program on women with stress urinary incontinence, the amount of urinary incontinence would reduce compared to before the exercise was supported(p=.001). The hypothesis 3 that after carrying out pelvic muscle exercise program on women with stress urinary incontinence, the maximum vaginal contraction pressure would increase compared to before the exercise was supported (p=.012). These results suggest that pelvic muscle exercise program has an effect on women with stress urinary incontinence in the degree and amount of urinary incontinence and maximum vaginal contraction pressure. So it is judged that training women with stress urinary incontinence for pelvic muscle exercise is an effective nursing intervention strategy in order to care urinary incontinence.
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