Abdominal Stretching Exercise in Decreasing Pain of Dysmenorrhea among Nursing Students

Dysmenorrhea is common among young women and could interfere studying concentration. This pain could be reduced by stretching. The study purpose was to determine the decrease of dysmenorrhea pain rate after being given abdominal stretching exercise on nursing students at STIKES TanawaliPersada, Takalar, Indonesia. A quasi-experimental study by pre-test post-test control group design on 96 random sampling samples consisting of 48 stretching intervention and 48 controls group. Abdominal stretching was given for 15 minutes, two times a week, for three weeks. Data analysis uses the tests of Mann-Whitney, Wilcoxon, and McNemar. The pain scale difference between intervention with control group on pretest was not significant (p value = 0,210), but posttest was significant with p = 0,001. A significance pain difference between the pretest and posttest intervention groups (p = 0.001). The difference in pretest and posttest control group pain was not significant (p = 0.068). Overall, there was a marked decreasing in the mean differences of pain value between the intervention groups and the controls with p = 0.000. This pain reduction was not affected by age of menarche and menstrual period. Therefore, abdominal stretching exercises suggested for young women to deal with primary dysmenorrheal in a non-drug manner.