Fecal incontinence: Help for patients who suffer silently
Once you’ve identified patients with this embarrassing condition, achieving optimal outcomes hinges on your familiarity with advances like sacral nerve stimulation.
Regardless of the type of treatment they receive, patients often do not achieve total continence. Anyone who continues to have occasional episodes of fecal incontinence or leakage should be advised to wear incontinence pads, as needed.
Consider colostomy when incontinence is severe
For patients with fecal incontinence severe enough to be disabling—often as a result of irradiation—colostomy remains a tried and true treatment. The rectum can either be left intact or a proctectomy performed in concert with ostomy creation. Most studies evaluating colostomy for the treatment of incontinence have found that it significantly improves the quality of life and that most patients say they would choose to undergo the procedure again.52
