Lessons Learned from a Decade of Multicenter Cooperative Clinical Trials in Stress Urinary Incontinence

Stress urinary incontinence (SUI) is estimated to affect 12 % to 55 % of women at some point in their life. Furthermore, 15 % to 35 % of adult American women report that their quality of life is altered by urinary incontinence. In addition to the toll SUI takes on patient lives-physically, socially and psychologically-it also comes at a significant cost to health care systems. In 1999, as an initiative of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the Urinary Incontinence Treatment Network (UITN) was born, with the primary task of developing trials to evaluate treatment of urinary incontinence in women. The purpose of this article is to review the SUI trials conducted and challenges faced, and to highlight the lessons learned from a decade of UITN work. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.