The Self-reported Prevalence and Knowledge of Urinary Incontinence and Barriers to Health Care-Seeking in a Community Sample of Canadian Women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study aimed to determine the prevalence and understanding of urinary incontinence (UI) in a community sample of Canadian women and identify barriers to health-care seeking. Women aged 20 or more were selected randomly from the community and interviewed about inappropriate urine loss within the previous 12 months, the meaning and causes of UI, and their demographics. Attitudes towards health care-seeking and average waiting intervals before medical encounter were also studied. With a response rate of 92%, 36.5% women admitted to having UI. Of this number, 76.5% considered themselves “incontinent” because of amount and/or frequency of leakage; only 55.8% sought medical advice, on average, 14 months post onset. Several reasons for not seeking help were identified. Only 46.2% of respondents interpreted “incontinence” as the inability to control urine; 19.4% defined incontinence as involuntary urine leakage. Exactly one-third of respondents did not know the causes of UI; 63.4% thought it was normal in old age, and 12.9% believed UI could not be cured or improved. Only 51.6% considered UI as any amount or frequency of uncontrolled urine loss. The study concluded that UI is prevalent, poorly-understood and under-reported in Canadian women because of inadequate public knowledge with consequent delay in management. This information should assist in formulating a public education strategy for UI and in planning the social and medical care of incontinent women.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".