MONDAY, Aug. 26, 2024 (HealthDay News) — A 12-week pelvic floor yoga program is not superior to a physical conditioning program for women with daily urinary incontinence, according to a study published online Aug. 27 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Alison J. Huang, MD, of the University of California San Francisco, and colleagues examined the effects of a therapeutic pelvic floor yoga program compared with a nonspecific physical conditioning program on UI in ambulatory women aged 45 years or older in a study conducted at three sites in California. The intervention consisted of a 12-week program of pelvic floor-specific Hatha yoga techniques (pelvic yoga) compared with concurrent instruction and practice of general muscle stretching and strengthening (physical conditioning program).

Among the 240 women who reported daily urge, stress, or mixed-type urinary incontinence, the average urinary incontinence frequency was 3.4 episodes per day, including 1.9 and 1.4 urge and stress-type episodes per day, respectively. The researchers found that overall urinary incontinence frequency decreased by an average of 2.3 and 1.9 episodes per day during a 12-week period with pelvic yoga and exercise training, respectively. There was a decrease of 1.2 and 1.0 episodes of urge urinary incontinence per day in the pelvic yoga and exercise training groups, respectively. No difference was found in the reduction in the frequency of stress-type urinary incontinence between the groups.

“As a pleiotropic behavioral intervention, yoga may offer greater therapeutic benefit in urinary urgency, an inherently more complex syndrome,” the authors write. “However, changes in type-specific urinary incontinence were only secondary outcomes and require further investigation.”

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