Knowing The Side Effects
As with most surgical procedures, there are potential risks and complications associated with surgery. Your physician can further explain your specific risks based on your medical history. Some adverse reactions include: device malfunction or failure which may require revision surgery, wearing away/loss of tissue , inability to urinate , infection, and postoperative pain.¹
Medications For Urinary Incontinence
If medications are used, this is usually in combination with other techniques or exercises.
The following medications are prescribed to treat urinary incontinence:
- Anticholinergics calm overactive bladders and may help patients with urge incontinence.
- Topical estrogen may reinforce tissue in the urethra and vaginal areas and lessen some of the symptoms.
- Imipramine is a tricyclic antidepressant.
How Is Urinary Incontinence Treated
You and your doctor or nurse will work together to create a treatment plan. You may start with steps you can take at home. If these steps do not improve your symptoms, your doctor or nurse may recommend other treatments depending on whether you have stress incontinence or urge incontinence or both.
Be patient as you work with your doctor or nurse on a treatment plan. It may take a month or longer for different treatments to begin working.
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Using Nerve Stimulation For An Overactive Bladder
If youre finding lifestyle changes and medication cant control your overactive bladder symptoms, your doctor may recommend a slightly more invasive approach for long-term relief.
A procedure known as nerve stimulation involves implanting a small electronic device into the body, almost like a pacemaker, which sits under your skin and sends electrical impulses to the sacral nerve, which plays a significant role in bladder emptying.
This treatment aims to strengthen the supporting muscles of the bladder and leads to better control. However, theres no guarantee that this procedure will eradicate all of your overactive bladder symptoms.
Botulinum Toxin Type A
Injecting Botox directly into the bladder muscle could help you obtain temporary relief from male urinary incontinence. Botox will block the neurological action of acetylcholine and relax the overactive bladder muscle for some time. You may have to repeat Botox injections one or two times a year.
The FDA has warned about the potential adverse reactions of Botox, both for approved and non-approved treatments. Some researchers have indicated that Botox treatment for male urinary incontinence may also increase UTI risks, but the data on this is inconclusive.
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Behavioral And Lifestyle Changes
Changing your lifestyle may help with bladder problems. Losing weight, quitting smoking, saying no to alcohol, choosing water instead of other drinks, and limiting drinks before bedtime can help with some bladder problems. Preventing constipation and avoiding lifting heavy objects may also help with incontinence. Even after treatment, some people still leak urine from time to time. There are bladder control products and other solutions, including disposable briefs or underwear, furniture pads, and urine deodorizing pills that may help.
Visit the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases for more information on urinary incontinence in men and urinary incontinence in women.
How Soon After Starting Kegel Exercises Will Urinary Incontinence Get Better
It may take 4 to 6 weeks before you notice any improvement in your symptoms.10
Kegel exercises work differently for each person. Your symptoms may go away totally, you may notice an improvement in your symptoms but still have some leakage, or you may not see any improvement at all. But even if your symptoms dont get better, Kegel exercises can help prevent your incontinence from getting worse.
You may need to continue doing Kegel exercises for the rest of your life. Even if your symptoms improve, urinary incontinence can come back if you stop doing the exercises.
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Should I Drink Less Water Or Other Fluids If I Have Urinary Incontinence
No. Many people with urinary incontinence think they need to drink less to reduce how much urine leaks out. But you need fluids, especially water, for good health.
Women need 91 ounces of fluids a day from food and drinks.11 Getting enough fluids helps keep your kidneys and bladder healthy, prevents urinary tract infections, and prevents constipation, which may make urinary incontinence worse.
After age 60, people are less likely to get enough water, putting them at risk for dehydration and conditions that make urinary incontinence worse.12
Treatment Options For Urge Urinary Incontinence
The initial management of urge urinary incontinence and OAB is non-surgical.
- Pelvic floor exercises
- Bladder retraining
- Anticholinergic medication
If these measures fail to adequately control urge incontinence or OAB symptoms, surgical treatment options available include:
- Botulinum toxin injections into the bladder
- Sacral neuromodulation it is hoped that the InterStim device for this problem will be shortly approved for usage in Australia
- Bladder surgery
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What Can We Do About It
First off, go see a urologist. Ill do a physical exam, talk to you about your symptoms and how long theyve been going on, and run a test on your urine. If these dont give us a solid diagnosis of the problem, we may do other tests.
How we treat male incontinence is based on what we find out as the cause, and also on how much the control problems are affecting your life. At Urology Associates, we generally like to start with what you can do on your own and go from there.
If lifestyle changes dont solve your problems, we may move to medications. Some cases may require surgery, but not that many do.
- Nerve stimulation for OAB. Also called neuromodulation therapy, this involves implanting a small device under the skin near the tailbone that sends electrical impulses to the nerves going to the bladder. It acts like a heart pacemaker by controlling bladder contractions. Other neuromodulation therapies may also help.
- Sling surgery for severe urinary incontinence. A bulbourethal sling goes under the bulb part of the urethra and is secured to bone or muscle. This lifts up and compresses the urethra, helping it resist pressure from the abdomen.
- Urethral bulking. To prevent urine leakage, we close a hole in the urethra or thicken its wall by adding material to it.
- Adding an artificial sphincter. This is an inflatable silicone device we place around the urethra that acts like the sphincter muscle.
What Steps Can I Take At Home To Treat Urinary Incontinence
Your doctor or nurse may suggest some things you can do at home to help treat urinary incontinence. Some people do not think that such simple actions can treat urinary incontinence. But for many women, these steps make urinary incontinence go away entirely, or help leak less urine. These steps may include:
You can also buy pads or protective underwear while you take other steps to treat urinary incontinence. These are sold in many stores that also sell feminine hygiene products like tampons and pads.
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Surgical Treatments For Pop
Women with symptomatic POP often benefit from surgical treatment in the setting of severe prolapse, failure of conservative therapy, or when definitive management is desired. It is estimated that by age 80, 30% of the women with POP will have undergone at least one reconstructive surgery.59 The choice of a primary POP repair is affected by many patients and surgical factors, including age, POP stage, medical comorbidities such as obesity, and desire for future sexual activity.1 The most common surgical approaches for POP treatment will be reviewed here, including both native-tissue and mesh-based repairs. An evaluation of treatment efficacy, trends, controversies, and opportunities for further research for each repair method is also outlined.
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Medications For Overactive Bladder
Drugs used to treat OAB block the abnormal contractions of the bladder muscle and can therefore also help ease the symptoms of urge urinary incontinence in both men and women. Youll find a list of OAB medications available in Canada on page 20. Generally speaking, these drugs fall into three categories:
Anticholinergics
Anticholinergic medications block the action of acetylcholine, a chemical messenger that tells the muscles of the bladder wall to contract. Unfortunately, acetylcholine acts in other parts of the body as well, so medications that block it can cause unwanted side effects like dry mouth, blurred vision, impaired cognition and constipation. New extended or prolonged release versions of anticholinergic medications reduce the incidence of side effects and improve compliance because they only need to be taken once a day to produce a steady absorption rate and constant blood levels of the drug.
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What Can You Do To Relieve Urinary Incontinence
Urinary incontinence almost never goes away on its own. But there are steps you can take to help relieve your symptoms.
Alleviating urinary incontinence starts with understanding which type of incontinence youre experiencing and whats causing it, says Dr. Lindo. A specialist such as a urogynecologist can help provide those answers for you, as well as help you understand which behavior modifications and other treatments will be most effective for alleviating your incontinence.
Weight loss almost always helps relieve urinary incontinence because it reduces the amount of pressure being placed on your pelvic floor. In fact, losing just 5 percent of your weight can improve your urinary symptoms by up to 70 percent.
Similarly, pelvic floor exercises, such as Kegels, can help reduce symptoms of either type of incontinence. In the case of stress incontinence, pelvic floor exercises are a way to restrengthen your weakened muscles. For urge incontinence, these exercises can help calm and retrain your bladder.
For women experiencing stress incontinence after childbirth, sometimes weight loss and postnatal pelvic floor exercises are all it takes for symptoms to resolve over time, adds Dr. Lindo.
Depending on the type of incontinence youre experiencing, your doctor may suggest trying additional modifications.
Behavioral modifications for stress incontinence:
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Reducing Stress Can Help
Life with incontinence can be stressful. Simple relaxation techniques, like breathing exercises or meditation, may help you cope with symptoms. Biofeedback is another approach — you watch a monitor that gives you real-time information about muscle contractions around your bladder. With time, you can learn how to relax your body, ease your muscles, and maybe get control of your symptoms.
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Types Of Male Incontinence
They’re playing golf.
They’re doing kind of the things in their day-to-day living.
Simply getting out of a chair can cause a leakage, so it can be quite debilitating.
It’s difficult to go out to dinner if you’re worried about having wet pants, changing multiple pads per day.
Car trips are often difficult or leaving the house for long periods of time. It can really change someone’s life.
Basically, what we do is we make a small incision in the perineum, which is the space in between the legs, to locate the urethra or the tube that you pee through.
So, what we’re looking at here is we’ve split the fat layer over top of the urethra, and we’re just now getting into the muscle that surrounds the urethra. Last loop.
So, what we’ve essentially done here to start the case is we’ve made an incision through the perineum and dissected down through the subcutaneous fat.
We’ve spread open the bulbospongiosus muscle, which is the muscle used for ejaculatory function, to expose the urethra, which is this blue midline structure, which we also have the blue tape wrapped around.
This is the area where our artificial sphincter is gonna go and where we specifically size it and custom fit it to the patient’s needs in terms of their degree of incontinence.
So, this is the cuff that we’re going to place here in the patient.
This will provide the pressure support to help hold the urethra closed. Here you can see the cuff being put into place. We’re just going to deploy this.
How Do I Do Kegel Exercises
To do Kegels:
If you are uncomfortable or uncertain about doing Kegel exercises on your own, a doctor or nurse can also teach you how to do Kegels. A pelvic floor physical therapist or other specialist may also be available in your area to help teach you how to strengthen these muscles.
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Treat Urinary Incontinence: Schedule A Visit With Us
If you or a loved one has been experiencing the symptoms of urinary incontinence, its time to schedule a visit with our team.
Our board-certified urologists will listen to your symptoms, and work with you to determine next steps for UI treatment. You are simply one call away from treating urinary incontinence once and for alltrust our team to help you achieve a healthy, leak-free life once again!
Have questions or looking for additional resources? We can help with those, too. In our Nutrition & Lifestyle Guide, we discuss healthy habits that will help improve your urological health and lifestyle. Download your free guide below!
What Are The Symptoms Of Incontinence
The main symptom of incontinence is a leakage of urine. This could be a constant dripping of urine or an occasional experience of leakage. If you have incontinence, you might have large amounts or small amounts of leaked urine. You might experience leakage for a wide variety of reasons often depending on the type of incontinence you have.
You might leak urine when you:
- Have an urge to urinate, but cant make it to the toilet on time.
- Have to get up in the middle of night to urinate .
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Take An Otc Pain Reliever
Over-the-counter pain medications can temporarily relieve pain caused by a UTI. Use caution here, and always speak with a doctor first, as some UTIs can turn into kidney infections. In these cases, patients should avoid taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, making the infection worse.
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Control Your Urge To Urinate
You may be able to control, or suppress, the strong urge to urinate, which is called urge or urgency suppression. With this type of bladder training, you can worry less about finding a bathroom in a hurry. Some people distract themselves to take their minds off needing to urinate. Other people find that long, relaxing breaths or holding still can help. Doing pelvic floor exercises to strengthen your pelvic floor also can help control the urge to urinate. Quick, strong squeezes of the pelvic floor muscles can help suppress urgency when it occurs, which may help you get to the toilet before you leak.
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Cut Back On Diuretics Like Caffeine And Alcohol
Caffeine and alcohol are both double trouble, says Ramin. Theyre diuretics and they stimulate bladder function. If you suffer from urinary incontinence, one of your worst enemies can be caffeinated beverages, he says. Though it can be much easier said than done, limiting or eliminating caffeine altogether has been known to be successful in diminishing and resolving issues of urinary incontinence in some women.
Similarly, he adds, alcoholic beverages act as bladder stimulants and diuretics in most people. So when you have a problem with urinary continence, consuming even slight amounts of alcohol can make matters worse.
If you cant function without your daily cup of coffee, try to keep it to the morning so youre not getting up to pee at night. And if you like having a glass of wine to wind down, at least limit it to one and keep it as far from bedtime as possible. Or, just take a break from caffeine or alcohol for a week or two, and see if the benefits you notice are worth it.
Lifestyle Factors To Prevent Male Incontinence
There are various lifestyle factors that can play a significant or even decisive role in the occurrence of male incontinence. These are the most important factors to consider if you want to prevent this problem.
Hopkins Medicine stresses that you watch your diet and avoid certain foods in order to avoid male incontinence. This includes skipping alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, spicy foods, and others. Your diet is the primary way to avoid male incontinence, since many consumables such as caffeine and alcohol encourage urination much more so than healthier alternatives.
Keeping off excess weight/losing weight is another excellent way to prevent incontinence. Those who are overweight or obese are more likely to experience incontinence. This might be due to the added pressure placed on your urinary tract by the extra pounds.
Webmd.com mentions Kegel exercises as an effective way to treat an overactive bladder, a common form of incontinence. These exercises are simple and very intuitive, and they can be done just about anywhere. Positive results can be seen from these exercises in three to six weeks, if you do them daily.
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