FPSUND - PAN-CANADIAN EVALUATION OF A CLINICAL CLASSIFICATION OF URINARY-INCONTINENCE

Historically, urinary incontinence is divided into 3 subtypes: stress, urge and mixed. This latter group, which according to many studies ca n account for up to 50% of the patients, is very heterogenous, For thi s same reason, the reports of treatments of urinary incontinence are v ery difficult to analyse using this simple classification. In a attemp t to clarify this situation and to help the acquisition of useful clin ical information relating to urinary incontinence, were have developed a clinical classification of urinary incontinence (FPSUND) in which 6 symptoms are graded in severity from 0 to 3. In this acronym, the F s tands for frequency, the P for the use of protection, the S for stress -related complaints, the U for urge-related complaints, the N for noct uria and the D for the number of daily micturitions. Urologists across Canada were sent the French or English version of the classification and used it to evaluate 148 female patients aged from 18 to 70, suffer ing from urinary incontinence. A second, independent evaluation, was a lso performed on the same patients by registered nurses or urodynamic technicians. Reproducibility between observers, as assessed by the wei ghted Kappa score ranged from 0.47 and 0.74 (p < 0.05), was very good. Generally, the users of the classification found it very easy to use. In summary, we propose the FPSUND clinical classification of urinary incontinence as a useful and accurate tool to classify urinary inconti nence and as a means to assess treatment outcome.