Urinary Incontinence: An Embarrassing Health Problem

It's mortifying, it's sometimes unpredictable, and it happens on occasion to one out of three women. It's urinary incontinence, the act of losing urine by accident. It's one of the last things a person wants to have happen, and miserably embarrassing at best.

Leakage occurs with exercise, sudden movements, laughter, coughing, and sneezing-and that just names a few of the times it can show up, unwelcome and uninvited. There is help, from external creams to surgery, but every conventional medical aid seems to be incomplete and/or come with unpleasant side effects. It's important that a woman look into each option thoroughly before deciding on any of them.

There are two kinds of surgery available. The trouble is that the success rate isn't terribly high, and doctors tend to differ with patients about what constitutes a successful operation. In a recent study of over six hundred women, the surgery that ranks highest in success also had the most unpleasant side effects. That was the sling procedure, where the surgeon uses some of the patient's own tissue to build a sling around the urethra.

The second procedure is the burch colpsuspension, where the surgeon attaches sutures to a pelvic ligament in order to support the urethra.

Two years after the surgeries, the sling procedure had a forty-seven percent overall success rate, compared to the thirty-eight percent for the burch colsuspension operation. The sling had more problems with the after effects, such as more urinary tract infections, emptying their bladders, and suffering from post-operative urge incontinence (overactive bladder.) The test ratings on both declined steadily over the two-year period.

There are numerous medications that can be taken. The major ones used are anticholinergics, alpha-andrenergic agonist, and estrogen. Other options are antidepressant imipramine and the synthetic hormone desmopressin. The latter is more commonly used for bed-wetting in children.