Pelvic Floor Dysfunctions and Female Athletes

Overview

Pelvic floor dysfunctions (PFD) are especially prevalent among females athletes due to the efforts from sports practice. As conservational management, increasing the athletes' information regard important research lines. However, embarrassment of female athletes limits educational or health demands and facilitate an invisible condition, potentially influenced by gender stereotypes. New technologies could facilitate engaging virtual educational approaches. This study will evaluate the effects of an educational online session about PFD in the knowledge about it, and practices related with it, existing gender stereotypes and PFD diagnosis of female athletes. To this end, all female athletes who practice Track and Field in Spain will be invited to attend an educational online session with theoretical-practical content about PF. As eligibility criteria, participants should train and compete in any of the Track and Field modalities, and have federative license from regional or national Track and Field Federation at the moment of the start of the study. Participants should have at least 18 years old. The investigators expect 400 athletes to fulfill the questionnaires, of which the investigators expect 200 to attend the educational online session. Before the educational online session, all female athletes will reply an anonymous questionnaire to inform about their knowledge of PFD, daily practices related to PFD, influencing gender stereotypes and PFD auto-reported diagnosis. One month later, this questionnaire will be sent to female athletes (both athletes who attended the educational session or not) to describe changes after attending the online educational session and compared to those athletes who did not attend it. The main outcomes will be the level of knowledge about PF, the number of detrimental practices potentially related to PFD, the number of healthy practices to care PF and existence of influencing gender stereotypes. As an additional outcome, it will be considered the PFD auto-reported diagnosis.

The educational online session will last 90 minutes, as follows: 10 minutes of contextualization, 40 minutes of practical content about pelvic floor consciousness and 40 of theoretical content (anatomy and practices related to PFD). Also, a 3D realistic virtual model of pelvic floor structures will be used.