Quality of Life Is Markedly Improved in Patients With Fecal Incontinence After Sacral Nerve Stimulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: The aim of the present analysis was to report on the relationship between long-term improvement in quality of life (QOL) and fecal incontinence (FI) severity and long-term reduction in FI episodes after sacral nerve stimulation (SNS) or sacral neuromodulation. METHODS: Patients who met inclusion/exclusion criteria, and initially had more than 2 FI episodes per week, were offered SNS therapy. Patients with 50% or higher reduction in FI during a 2-week test period were implanted with a neurostimulator (InterStim; Medtronic, Minneapolis, Minn). Assessments were completed by patients at baseline and at 3, 6, and 12 months after implant, and annually thereafter. The present report includes data from the 4-year postimplant follow-up. RESULTS: A total of 133 patients underwent test stimulation with a 90% success rate, and as a result, 120 (110 females) with a mean age of 60.5 years and a mean duration of FI of 6.8 years received long-term implantation. Of them, 78 patients completed all or part of the 4-year follow-up assessment. Fecal incontinence episodes decreased from a mean of 9.4 per week at baseline to 1.9 per week at 48 months (P < 0.001). The 4-year analyses showed that SNS had a positive and sustained impact on all 4 scales of the Fecal Incontinence Quality of Life questionnaire (P < 0.001), Fecal Incontinence Severity Index scores improved from a mean of 39.9 to 28 (P < 0.001), and self-rated bowel health scores improved from a mean of 3.5 to 6.9 (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Sacral nerve stimulation not only restores or improves continence in treated patients with chronic FI but also improves their quality of life and symptom severity.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".