Background. urinary incontinence is defined as any involuntary loss of urine. the tVt (tension-free Vaginal tape) operation is a treatment for stress urinary incontinence introduced in poland in the year 2000. there are few studies evaluating the long-term effectiveness of tVt in polish women. Objectives. to evaluate the long-term effectiveness of tVt in the treatment of stress urinary incontinence in women. Material and methods. 40 women operated on in the period 1999-2004 were recalled 12.6 ±

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... 1.2 years after tVt for a follow-up study. 85 vs 15% of women were operated on due to primary vs recurrent stress incontinence, respectively. 20 vs 80% of the patients had mixed vs pure stress urinary incontinence, respectively. the effectiveness of tVt operations was assessed objectively on the basis of a cough test, and subjectively on improvement after treatment according to the patients' answers (yes/no), pgi-i, psQ and Vas ("0" was the total absence of improvement after surgery, "100" -total improvement). Results. the cough test was negative in 85% of cases. subjectively, 85% of women declared improvement after tVt. Based on pgi-i -77.5% of them maintained improvement after surgery. Based on psQ -70% of the women assessed control of urinary incontinence after surgery as better, 72.5% were satisfied with the results of the operation, and 77.5% of them would recommend tVt to other women. Based on Vas, total improvement was noted by 12.5% of women, 60% of women rated improvement "50-99", and total lack of improvement was noted by 20% of the women. Conclusions. tVt seems to be an effective form of treatment for urinary incontinence in women 12 years after surgery. Summary ISSN 1734-3402, eISSN 2449-8580 this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution-nonCommercial-sharealike 4.0 international (CC By-nC-sa 4.0). license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).