Leaking urine when coughing, sneezing, or exercising (stress urinary incontinence) is a common problem for women. This is especially so after giving birth, when about one woman in three will leak urine. Training of the pelvic floor muscles is the most common form of treatment for this problem. One way that women can train these muscles is by inserting cone-shaped weights into the vagina, and then contracting the pelvic floor muscles to stop the weights from slipping out again.
Seventeen small studies, involving 1484 women, were found. The results of these studies consistently showed that the use of vaginal weights is better than having no treatment. When vaginal weights were compared to other treatments, such as pelvic floor muscle training without the weights, and electrical stimulation of the pelvic floor, no clear differences between the treatments were evident. This may have been because the numbers of participants in the trials were small, and larger numbers may be required for any differences in the effectiveness of treatments to become clear.
Some women find vaginal weights unpleasant or difficult to use, so this treatment may not be useful for all women.
Many women with stress urinary incontinence will not be cured by these treatments, and so it is important for studies to assess quality of life during and after treatment, but few of these studies did. Most of the studies were fairly short term, so it is difficult to say what happens to women with stress urinary incontinence in the longer term.