[Urinary stress incontinence: surgical experience in our center]

For the treatment of the urinary stress incontinence, there are many techniques, and today the gold standard is that described by Burch. We compared the global and each technique results about rates of postoperative continence and complications seen in our experience.

We made a retrospective analysis of 292 women that have the first surgery for urinary stress incontinence in our centre, between 1991 and 2006. We considered cure the patient who did not have any level of incontinence postoperative, we made a Kaplan-Meier analysis for the postoperative continence evaluation. Besides we studied the behaviour of the postoperative complications found.

Mean age was 53.6 years old, and mean time of follow up was 15.6 months. The vaginal techniques were the most practised (138), followed by the TVT (57), abdominal Burch (38), vaginal wall Sling (33), and the less was the laparoscopic Burch (26). The best rates of postoperative continence after 2 years were observed in the patients treated by TVT (87.6%), then with vaginal wall Sling (84.9%), laparoscopic Burch (59.3%), abdominal Burch (59.1%), and the worst with vaginal techniques (48.2%) (p = 0.007). We found more urgency and urge incontinence in the patients treated by TVT (36.8% y 21.1% respectively), and postoperative pain with vaginal techniques (36.2%). Postoperative urine retention and postoperative high residual urine more with the vaginal wall sling (54.5%) and vaginal techniques (26.1%) respectively.

We have the best results for the incontinence treatment in our population with the TVT technique.