Avaliação do equilíbrio postural em mulheres continentes e incontinentes ; Evaluation of postural balance in continent and incontinent women

Introduction: Urinary incontinence (UI) is defined as any involuntary loss of urine, which can be detected by abnormalities of the bladder, neurological diseases or changes in the strength of the pelvic muscles, in addition to increased pressure on the pelvic muscles (MAP), ligaments and connective tissue. Objective: To analyze and compare the postural balance of continent and incontinent women. Materials and methods: This is a cross-sectional study, with a quantitative approach. Thirteen women were included, divided into two groups: 6 incontinent women (group GI) and 7 continent women (group GC). The evaluation of postural balance was performed on the force platform and was tested in the following tasks: feet with eyes open (BI_OA), feet with eyes closed (BI_OF), standing on a foam of approximately 15 cm thick with eyes open (ESP_OA) and closed (ESP_OF) and with unipodal support with eyes open (UNI_OA). The following features were calculated: RMS of the displacement of the center of pressure (COP) in the mid-lateral (COP_X) and anteroposterior (COP_Y) directions, total displacement (DT) and total mean speed (VMT), characteristics of DFA (Detrended Fluctuation Analysis) and SDA (Stabilogram Diffusion Analysis). The data processing collected from the force platform was performed through routines programmed in the R software. Statistical analysis was performed after resampling the original data 20 times using the Bootstrap technique. Categorical variables were represented by frequency distribution and numerical measures by measures of central tendency and variability. The data were tested with the Shapiro-Wilk normality test, in the variables in which the hypothesis of the data was rejected, the Mann-Whitney test was used, for the data with normal distribution the t-student test was used. Value of α was fixed at 0.05 or 5% (p <0.05). For statistical analysis, the R software was used. Results: Six incontinent women with an average age of 41.5 ± 9.13 years participated in the study, and seven continent women with ...