Introduction: Urge urinary incontinence is an important and commonly unaddressed issue in the women's health. It affects women of all ages. Urge incontinence can be of an idiopathic origin and can be observed as a part of overactive bladder syndrome. Urge urinary incontinence worsens the quality of life and can lead to social isolation. The optimal therapy to treat urge incontinence is yet unknown. Purpose: The purpose of the thesis is to compare the effects of the transcutaneous and percutaneous electrical stimulation of the posterior tibial nerve to the conservative treatment and pharmacologic treatment, based on the review of scientific literature. Methods: The research was obtained using the following online databases: PubMed, MEDLINE, CINAHL, PEDro and Cochrane library. The inclusion criteria were: randomized controlled trial, published after year 2007, in Slovenian, English, Spanish or Dutch language, urge urinary incontinence of the unknown origin, participants with at least 18 years of age, score 4 or more on the PEDro scale. Results: From 431 examined articles, nine were included in the literature review. They were published between the years 2009 and 2016. Results show that both transcutaneous and percutaneous tibial nerve stimulation improve the quality of life, decrease the number of incontinence episodes and urinary frequency episodes. Percutaneous stimulation of the posterior tibial nerve gives the comparable results to the pharmacologic treatment. The effectiveness of the percutaneous tibial nerve stimulation is not due to placebo effect. Discussion and conclusion: The percutaneous and transcutaneous tibial nerve stimulation are hard to compare. Transcutaneous tibial nerve stimulation unlike percutaneous tibial nerve stimulation does not have side effects. Subjective assessment of the symptoms on the quality of life, plays a crucial role when assessing he effectiveness of the method. Additional high quality research is needed prior to using transcutaneous stimulation of posterior tibial nerve in clinical environment.
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