Vaginal douching among married Turkish women and relation to quality of life

Abstract

This study is intended to review vaginal douching practices and associated factors and assessment of quality of life among married Turkish women. This is a cross-sectional study conducted on women admitted to Ankara Dr Nafiz Korez Sincan State Hospital in Turkey between March 01 and June 30, 2014. The study group consisted of 663 women. A Personal Information Form was used to collect data on some socio-demographic characteristics of the women, vaginal douching practices and some variables believed to be associated and the Short Form-36 (SF-36) to determine their quality of life. Mean age of the women in the study group was 33.46±10.38 yrs. In this study, prevalence of vaginal douching was determined to be 41.2%. Vaginal douching was mostly performed for cleaning and feeling comfortable (27.6%). The frequency of vaginal douching was higher in premenopausal women, women with a history of dyspareunia, with chronic pelvic pain, with urinary incontinence, with a history of sexual intercourse at least once or more in a week, with a history of genitourinary infection and those using traditional birth control method (p<0.05, for each one). No difference was observed between women who douche and do not douche in terms of scores obtained from all domains of SF-36 (p>0.05 for each domain).