International Journal of Scientific Reports | July 2019 | Vol 5 | Issue 7 Page 160 pISSN 2454-2156 | eISSN 2454-2164 International Journal of Scientific Reports Begum S et al. Int J Sci Rep. 2019 Jul;5(7):160-166 http://www.sci-rep.com Original Research Article Urinary incontinence among female patients attending a selected public hospital in Bangladesh Shima Begum 1 , Khondoker Mahmuda Akter Halim 2 , Ratna Khatun 3 , Sharmin Islam 3 , A. B. M. Alauddin Chowdhury 4 , Faisal Muhammad 4 * INTRODUCTION Urethral incontinence is the constant or periodic loss of urine without warning and may be urge incontinence, stress incontinence, overflow incontinence or sphincter weakness incontinence. 1 The prevalence of urge incontinence increases with aging, when uninhibited bladder contractions are caused by neurologic disease such as spinal cord tumors, multiple sclerosis or stroke. 1 Urinary incontinence is one of the serious public health problem with negative social consequences, more especially for women. Women are much more susceptible to urinary incontinence than men. This may be due to ABSTRACT Background: Urinary incontinence is a frequent public health problem with negative social consequences, particularly for women. Women are much more susceptible to urinary incontinence than men. Female susceptibility is the result of anatomical, social, economic and cultural factors. Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted to find out the factors related to urinary incontinence, distribution of types of incontinence among female patients and their health care seeking behavior and socio-demographic characteristics among 121 adult female patients who attended the outpatient department of Gynae and Obstetrics department and Urology department of Dhaka Medical College and Hospital during the period of January to June 2016. Data were collected through face to face interview. Results: The mean age of the respondents was 43.42 years and the mean monthly income of the respondents was 17409.09 taka. Little above nine-tenths (91.7%) of the respondents were Muslim and the majority of the respondents (47.9%) were living in pacca house. More than seven-tenths (73.6%) of the respondents were married and over 35% of the respondents were illiterate. Among the respondents about 42.1% of them had pressure type of incontinence, followed by mixed incontinence (27.3%). Over 65% had some complication during delivery and little above six- tenths (61.2%) had gynecological problems. Conclusions: Female urinary incontinence is a frequent and a major embarrassing healthcare problem in Bangladesh. Patients who had complications during labor, having multipara, recurrent UTI, gynecological problem such as uterine prolapse, urethral injury, had high percentage of urinary incontinence. Patients with urinary incontinence should be encouraged to seek treatment early as the problem can be treated. Keywords: Urinary, Incontinence, Health, Female, Patients 1 Department of Pediatric Nursing, Dhaka Shishu Hospital, Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Dhaka, Bangladesh 2 Department of Nutrition, 3 Department of Adult Medical and Surgical Nursing, Grameen Caledonian College of Nursing, Mirpur-2, Dhaka, Bangladesh 4 Department of Public Health, Faculty of Allied Health Sciences, Daffodil International University, Dhaka, Bangladesh Received: 15 March 2019 Accepted: 21 May 2019 *Correspondence: Mr. Faisal Muhammad, E-mail: fokkanya@yahoo.com Copyright: © the author(s), publisher and licensee Medip Academy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18203/issn.2454-2156.IntJSciRep20192796