Autologous Fascial Slings for Surgical Management of Stress Urinary Incontinence: A Come Back

Stress urinary incontinence (SUI) is a common type of urinary incontinence adversely affecting the quality of life of women. For mild SUI, life style changes, pelvic floor exercises and medical treatment with duloxetine may help. Most patients of moderate to severe SUI usually require surgical treatment. Various surgical treatment options include Kelly’s plication, Burch colposuspension, bulking agents and sling surgeries. Although, suburethral fascial slings including the autologous rectus fascia slings were in vogue before 1990, they were overtaken by minimally invasive, faster and easier artificial midurethral slings (tension free vaginal tape and transobturator tape). However, observation of serious long-term and life changing complications of synthetic midurethral slings like mesh erosion, chronic pelvic pain and dyspareunia led to their adverse publicity and medico legal implications for the operating surgeons. This led US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) to issue a warning against their use. Currently, their use has significantly decreased in many countries, and they are no longer available in some countries. This has led to renaissance of use of natural autologous fascial sling, especially rectus fascia for surgical management of SUI. Although performing rectus fascia sling surgery is technically more challenging, takes longer, has more short-term morbidity like voiding dysfunction, their long-term success is high with very little risk of serious complications like mesh erosion, chronic pelvic pain and dyspareunia. However, multicentric trials and longer follow ups are needed before it’s routine recommendation This review discusses the role of autologous fascial sling (especially rectus fascia) for the surgical management of SUI in the current time and the need of ongoing training of this procedure to gynecology residents and urogynecology fellows.