Prevalence of urinary incontinence in Iranian women: systematic review and meta-analysis

Urinary incontinence is one of the priorities in the field of health because it has a significant impact on quality of life. Women with incontinence problem usually live in silence. Awareness of the precise prevalence rate will help to perform the proper interventions at the right time. Therefore, this study was performed with aim to determine the prevalence of urinary incontinence in Iranian women. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, the articles were searched in databases of Pubmed, Scopus, Magiran, SID, Cochran, and Google Scholar by the keywords of urinary incontinence, prevalence, frequency, women, stress urinary incontinence, urge urinary incontinence, Mixed incontinence, and all the possible combinations with OR, AND. Chi-square and I2 indices were used to calculate heterogeneity of studies. Egger and Begg tests were used to evaluate the release bias. Data were analyzed by Stata software (version 11). A total of 10 studies entered to the study which had 5008 participants. The estimation of the overall prevalence of urinary incontinence was 46% (confidence interval of 95%: 30-62), stress urinary incontinence was 34% (confidence interval of 95%: 27-42), urge urinary incontinence was 19% (confidence interval of 95%: 12-26), and mixed urinary incontinence was 24% (confidence interval of 95%: 11-37). The overall incidence of urinary incontinence in Iranian women is 46%, which indicates the urgent need for attention to this problem.