Learn About What Urinary Incontinence Is

Urinary incontinence is a big problem in the United States because of the aging
population. Basically, incontinence is the leakage of urine when you don’t want it to.
Incontinence is broken up into, let’s say, four major headings: there’s stress incontinence.
That means you're going to leak urine with stress such as a cough, a sneeze, a jump.
That’s probably the most common kind of incontinence that my patients complain about.

The second type of incontinence is incontinence from spasms of the bladder. The term
used is detrusor overactivity or even overactive bladder where the bladder, just on its
own, has a spasm, squeezes the bladder, and urine comes out.

The other type of incontinence, the third type, would be incontinence from the nerves not
working well. So the bladder gets full, so full that urine leaks out and the patient doesn’t
sense it.

So that’s one other type of incontinence, and then there’s another type of incontinence
that we don’t see in the United States too much, and that’s when there is a physical hole
between the bladder and the vagina. And that happens a lot in let’s say African countries
where childbirth trauma is so huge that holes occur between the bladder and the vagina.
In the United States it’s very rare, but these fistulas that form between the bladder and the
vagina are one source of incontinence that I don’t see very often.

And then you can also have incontinence that’s called mixed where you can have stress
incontinence where you leak when you cough, sneeze and jump, mixed in with spasms of
the bladder, sudden urges to go, so it can all be mixed up. It doesn’t always have to be a
pure one type of incontinence; they can all be mixed up.