Repercussões da amputação transfemoral e transtibial sobre a capacidade funcional, apoio social e incontinência urinária

Abstract

Lower limb amputations have been gradually increasing in Brazil as a result of vascularcomplications and traumatic accidents in most cases. This loss of a limb at some point canaffect the patient's life, causing physical, functional and social repercussions. The aim of thestudy was to compare urinary incontinence, risk of falls, functional capacity and socialsupport in adults with transfemoral and transtibial amputations. This is a descriptive research,with a transversal and quantitative approach. Research participants were evaluated at aSpecialized Center for Physical and Intellectual Rehabilitation, where they are monitored forrehabilitation and prosthetization. The sample consisted of men and women, between 18 and75 years of age with unilateral lower limb amputation at the transfemoral or transtibial level.Data are collected only after approval by the Ethics Committee and signing of the InformedConsent Form. The Mini Mental State Examination, Incontinence Severity Index, PortugueseVersion of Lubben's Brief Social Networks Scale, Lawton & Brody's Instrumental Activitiesof Daily Living Scale and Timed Up and Go Test were used for evaluation. descriptive,followed by the Shapiro-Wilk normality test. Comparisons between groups of parametriccontinuous variables are performed using the two-tailed independent Student's T Test, and fornon-parametric continuous variables, the Mann Whitney U Test. For comparisons betweengroups of categorical variables, the Chi-square test was used. Adopting the significance levelof p<0.05 for all tests. Of the participants, 57% had Arterial Hypertension and 35% DiabetesMelittus, 17.8% reported being incontinent, with a mild to moderate impact on quality of life.For functional capacity, the greatest dependence was on traveling over long distances andusing means of transport. The social support received was more from friends and the risk offalls was classified as medium and low risk for the transfemoral and transtibial groups,respectively. There was no statistically significant difference between the studied groups. It isconcluded that few functional limitations, social support and the occurrence of incontinencewere found, encouraging further research to investigate the limitations and potential of thepublic of amputees.