**1. Introduction**

112 Urinary Incontinence

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Since the last decades, the elderly population is growing significantly and the projection for the next 20-25 years is that the range of over 80 is increasing. Frailty is accepted as a syndrome of late-life decline and vulnerability that serves as a warning sign for adverse health outcomes and for mortality. The identification of vulnerable, frail, adults may allow the development of preventive interventions which help to maintain good health and high quality of life well into the 8th and 9th decade of life.

Urinary incontinence (UI) is considered one of the main giants of Geriatrics, described by Sir Bernard Isaacs in 1976, and it has also included in the list of the Geriatric syndromes. The combination of a frail elderly and UI could be very negative due to its adverse effects both in terms of health as well as on quality of life.

Nowadays, the appropriate extent of diagnostic process in the elderly incontinent is not well established. In general, healthy older patients should receive the same diagnostic scheme as younger patients. By contrast, in frail older people an individual assessment is mandatory in order to decide the step of our diagnostic intervention. In the same way, the medical management of the younger elderly patients should be very similar to the young patients. But, the frailest elderly patients should be managed individually, adapting the different levels of intervention to the complexity of the frail elderly.

As a matter of fact, the appropriate knowledge of older population, the level of vulnerability and their true possibilities of improve with our intervention is very important to decide the best way of treating this syndrome in the frailest population.
