Weak pelvic muscles can allow urine to leak out causing stress urinary incontinence.
Stress Urinary Incontinence (SUI) is the most common type of incontinence. The “stress” in this incontinence refers to a physical stress that’s placed on the urinary system, such as a cough, sneeze, or laugh. About 50% of women occasionally experience SUI. While women experience stress incontinence more often then men, some men do experience it as well.Continue reading
If you find yourself having to wake up several times during the night to go to the bathroom, you have a condition that is called nocturia.
While most adults are able to sleep 6 – 8 hours a night, you may find yourself having to wake up several times during the night to go to the bathroom. This is a condition called nocturia.*
Nocturia can leave you feeling like you were up all night long, and you may feel extremely tired when morning arrives. Nocturia negatively affects a person’s quality of life by interrupting sleep, increasing the risk of nighttime falls, causing fatigue and/or depression, and decreasing work efficiency, among other possible problems. Men are much more frequently affected by nocturia than women are, and those who have difficulty walking are at increased risk of injury. Nocturia is also highly prevalent in individuals over 60 years of age.Continue reading
When you don’t feel the urge to urinate, the bladder may become overfilled, and urine may start to leak out. You may also not completely empty your bladder, causing urine to back-up and overflow. This condition is called overflow incontinence, or sometimes called “chronic retention of urine” or “chronic urinary retention”.Continue reading
Make sure you discuss your diagnosis with your doctor to rule out mixed incontinence.
In some cases, urinary incontinence can be a combination of both stress urinary incontinence (SUI) and urge incontinence. It is important to realize that if you have mixed incontinence, but only treat one of the two types, you will still have incontinence. In other words, both types of incontinence must be treated to see desirable results.Continue reading
Keeping a bathroom free of trip hazards will help a person with functional incontinence.
Functional incontinence is urinary or fecal leakage that occurs when the urinary or fecal body systems, respectively, are physiologically working fine. Functional incontinence is the result of mobility challenges with getting to the bathroom and/or dexterity challenges with removing clothing in a reasonable amount of time.Continue reading
Bowel incontinence or ABL occurs when stool or gas unexpectedly leaks from your rectum.
Bowel incontinence, which may also be referred to as fecal incontinence, anal incontinence or Accidental Bowel Leakage (ABL), is when stool or gas unexpectedly leaks from your rectum. Sometimes you feel the urge to have a bowel movement, but can’t reach a bathroom in time.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Bowel Control Awareness Campaign reports that more than 18 million Americans have bowel incontinence. As with urinary incontinence, bowel incontinence affects people of all ages, races, and both sexes. However, it is more common in women than in men, and it affects the elderly more often than younger adults (although it is not a normal part of aging).Continue reading
Just as you build strength lifting dumbbells, you can build strength in your pelvic floor using vaginal weights or cones.
Have you seen people exercise by lifting small weights over and over? This builds up muscles. Vaginal weights or cones are used the same way to help women do weight-lifting exercises for the pelvic floor.
Vaginal weights or cones are usually ordered through a catalog or website. They usually come as a set having several different weights. The vaginal weights are smooth and are made of plastic on the outside with a metal weight inside. They have a string to help you pull them back out when you are done with them (like a tampon). They are usually shaped like a V or cone.Continue reading
A urostomy or urinary diversion may be a life saving surgery.
A urostomy, or urinary diversion, is a surgical opening that is created to drain urine from the body after the bladder has been removed or bypassed. The urostomy allows urine to flow out of the body and into a plastic pouch that is worn to collect the urine. This allows for the preservation of normal kidney function.
A urostomy may be performed when a person has had bladder cancer, trauma to the bladder, severe incontinence that does not respond to other therapies or treatments, painful bladder, congenital abnormalities, neurological conditions and diseases, spinal cord injury, chronic inflammation of the bladder, interstitial cystitis, surgery, or radiation damage.Continue reading
Urine collection devices for men includes external (or condom) catheters.
Some external urine collection devices are designed just for men. These include the condom or external catheter. Male external collection devices include disposable and reusable products. Some are designed specifically for use during the day (while upright — walking or sitting). Some male collection devices are designed specifically for use at night when lying down. There are a variety of different types of products, but all are management tools — none actually treats or cures incontinence.
Creating a “sling” is one surgical method for helping alleviate the symptoms of stress urinary incontinence.
Surgeries for stress urinary incontinence (SUI) usually involve creating a small hammock under the bladder neck or mid urethra to help support it. Depending on the specific type of surgery, the hammock can be constructed of tissue taken from another area of your own body, or a synthetic material. When your sphincter muscle clamps down on the urethra, it presses against this new “hammock” which provides resistance and clamps the urethra closed, helping to keep urine in.Continue reading