Pelvic floor muscle training improves sexual function for women

Key takeaways:

• Pelvic floor muscle training improved arousal, orgasm, satisfaction, pain and the overall Female Sexual Function Index score.
• Researchers observed no adverse events with pelvic floor muscle training.

Pelvic floor muscle training improved reported sexual function for women with pelvic floor dysfunction, but uncertainties with specific sexual dysfunctions and exact dosing remain, according to researchers.

“A systematic review published in 2015 suggested a positive effect of pelvic floor muscle training in improving sexual function in women, especially arousal, orgasm, lubrication and pain; however, to the best of our knowledge, no meta-analysis has confirmed this benefit,” Cristine Homsi Jorge, MD, associate professor in the department of health science at the Pelvic Floor Muscle Function Laboratory at Ribeirão Preto School at the University of São Paulo, and colleagues wrote. “A critical finding of this systematic review was that only a few studies investigated sexual function as a primary outcome, and most of the studies included only women with pelvic floor dysfunction.”

Homsi Jorge and colleagues conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, of 21 randomized controlled trials obtained from several health care databases. All included studies compared pelvic floor muscle training with no intervention or another conservative treatment in at least one arm to improve women’s sexual function or treat sexual dysfunction.

Researchers observed a varying quality of the pelvic floor muscle training protocols with the Consensus on Exercise Reporting Template (CERT). In the four studies included in the meta-analysis, pelvic floor muscle training was associated with improved arousal (mean difference = 1.49; 95% CI, 0.13-2.85), orgasm (mean difference = 1.55; 95% CI, 0.13-2.96), satisfaction (mean difference = 1.46; 95% CI, 0.14-2.77), pain (mean difference = 0.74; 95% CI, 0.11-1.37) and the overall Female Sexual Function Index score (mean difference = 7.67; 95% CI, 0.77-14.57).

In addition, the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations (GRADE) approach demonstrated a very low certainty of evidence due to the high clinical and statistical heterogeneity of the data.

Pelvic floor muscle training was associated with no adverse events, the researchers reported.

“New, well-designed randomized controlled trials with high methodological and interventional quality are needed to clarify this and other uncertainties,” the researchers wrote.