34th Annual Scientific Meeting proceedings

Objectives:

Several surgical techniques for the treatment of medical therapy-resistant urinary incontinence have been reported to provide long term improvement of clinical signs in 53-70% of patients. However, very few articles are available regarding sling urethroplasty.

Methods:

Clinical records of 24 dogs are analysed in a retrospective study. All patients were diagnosed with medical therapy-resistant urinary incontinence and surgically treated with sling urethroplasty. Owners gave written consent to the procedure in all cases, and patients were included if there was a follow-up period of at least 6 months. Owners were interviewed via telephone to assess the details of the postoperative status and to identify complications followed by data analysis and statistics completed in R circumstances. Our hypothesis was that sling urethroplasty would result in clinically significant reduction or complete resolution of clinical symptoms in more than 50% of patients.

Results:

Results showed complete and sudden symptom-free status postoperatively in 78.57% of the cases. Long-term efficacy of the procedure was recorded at the time of telephone consultation (mean follow-up of 41.5 months) and patients were divided into 3 groups. The completely continent group contained 10 dogs (41.67%), the partially continent group consisted of 6 dogs (25%), and the incontinent group had 8 dogs (33.33%). Overall, 66.67% of patients managed to achieve voluntary control of urination and 86.9% of owners were satisfied with the surgery.

Conclusions:

Due to impressive long-term success rates and high owner satisfaction we believe that sling urethroplasty can be successfully applied as a treatment for medical therapy-resistant urinary incontinence.