Tape fixation: an important surgical step to improve success rate of anti-incontinence surgery.

Purpose: Mid urethral slings are effective surgical treatment for stress urinary incontinence. However, 5% to 20% of patients still experience surgical failure with clinically significant recurrent or persistent stress urinary incontinence. Since a subset of these failures may be caused by improper tape position, we elucidated whether additional paraurethral fixation of a tape to prevent displacement during tensioning could improve the transobturator sling outcome.

Materials And Methods: The study was done in 463 patients with stress urinary incontinence who were randomly allocated to treatment with a standard transobturator intravaginal monofilament sling procedure (232) or to an intravaginal transobturator monofilament sling with additional 2-point tape fixation (231). Another 2 absorbable sutures parallel to the urethra were added to fix the tape and prevent displacement during tape tensioning. Outcome was assessed by a cough test and a 1-hour pad test at 12 months.

Results: Clinical efficacy of the procedure with fixation was significantly higher with 195 women (95.12%) cured or improved compared to the 199 (88.73%) cured or improved with the standard sling (chi-square 5.71, p = 0.0169). There was no increase in intraoperative or postoperative complications. Also, among patients with intrinsic sphincter deficiency we noted a significantly better outcome in the fixation group than in the control group, that is 39 of 41 patients (95.1%) cured or improved vs 31 of 42 (73.8%) (chi-square 10.65, p = 0.0011).

Conclusions: Tape fixation significantly increases the clinical efficacy of the transobturator sling, especially in patients with intrinsic sphincter deficiency.