Reviewer's report
Title:Descriptive cross sectional study on prevalence, perceptions, predisposing
factors and health seeking behaviour of women with stress urinary incontinence
Version:1Date:4 April 2014
Reviewer: Cuili Wang
Reviewer's report:
Discretionary Revisions:
1. In the third paragraph of the result, the prevalence of SUI with age may be
better reported using the line figure instead.
Minor Essential Revisions:
1. In the method section of abstract, the surveyed region or country and the
duration of this survey should be provided. It is the case for the method section of
text. Whether the outpatients seek care for UI condition needed to be clarified.
2. Please recheck the data and ensure that the data in abstract should be
consistent with the text, such as range of age is 20-88 in abstract, while 21-88 in
the text. Abstract: #20 years, in the text: >20 years of age.
2. In the first paragraph of Material and Methods, i.e. “After obtaining ethical
clearance from the ethics review committee at Faculty of Medicine”, the
Institution such as “… University” is provided.
Major Compulsory Revisions:
1. In the second paragraph of Material and Methods, i.e. “A pre-tested, expert
validated (5 content experts were used in validation), interviewer 157
administered questionnaire was used as the study tool”, please provide the
details on psychometric characteristics, such as “content validity”.
2. The diagnosis criteria for SUI used in this study should be provided in the
method.
3. Table 4 is not clearly reported in that the reference is not listed. For example,
the second risk factor is parity. Only the parity #1 and its prevalence of UI was
listed, but the comparable group (null parity) and the related prevalence were not
listed. The chi square test is to test the prevalence of SUI between the two
groups. So the data presented here are not adequate. It is the case for other risk
factors.
In addition, for some risk factors such as UV prolapse, faecal incontinence, the
sample size may be small restricted to chi square tests.
4. In discussion, besides reporting the different fact or number, more deep
information or background in the surveyed country or region may help
understand the possible reasons for the differences between the surveyed Asian
setting and other western countries. For example, the third paragraph, the
reasons for not seeking care for UI.
5. In the fifth paragraph of discussion, “As reported in a study from Egypt [28],
uterovaginal prolapse seemed to coexist with urinary incontinence”, this is
different from the result in this study. The reason for the difference is partially in
that the sample size in this study (number of women with UV prolapse is 10) is
too small and the data or result is not adequate to support this conclusion.
Besides providing the supported references, more details on why the risk factor
increased the presence of SUI may improve readability or informative.
Level of interest: An article of limited interest
Quality of written English: Not suitable for publication unless extensively edited
Statistical review: Yes, and I have assessed the statistics in my report.
Declaration of competing interests:
I declare that I have no competing interests