INDIAN JOURNAL OF TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE, cilt.15, sa.4, ss.611-618, 2016 (SCI-Expanded)
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).