OVERACTIVE BLADDER, a Special Health Report from Harvard Medical School. There are steps that can be taken before considering surgery. No one should have to live with incontinence. An overactive bladder (also known as urge incontinence) causes a sudden urge to urinate, even when your bladder isn’t full. For some people it’s simply a nuisance. For others, the urge can’t be controlled, which leads to not only incontinence and poor quality of life. Bladder training can go a long way toward helping with urinary incontinence. Bladder control training entails learning to urinate on a schedule (timed voiding) and doing pelvic muscle exercises. Here’s a step-by-step bladder-training technique: 1. Keep track. For a day or two, keep track of the times you urinate or leak urine during the day. 2. Calculate. On average, how many hours do you wait between visits to the bathroom during the day? 3. Choose an interval. Based on your typical interval between needing to urinate, set your starting interval for training that is 15 minutes longer. So, if you usually make it for one hour before you need to use the bathroom, make your starting interval one hour and 15 minutes. 4. Hold back. On the day you start your training, empty your bladder first thing in the morning and don’t go again until you reach your target time interval. If the time arrives before you feel the urge, go anyway. If the urge hits first, remind yourself that your bladder isn’t really full, and use whatever techniques you can to delay going. Try the pelvic floor exercises (also called Kegels), or simply try to wait another five minutes before walking slowly to the bathroom. 5. Increase your interval. Once you are successful with your initial interval, increase it by 15 minutes. Over several weeks or months, you may find you are able to wait much longer and feel the urge less often. After four to eight weeks, if you think you have improved, do another diary. Compare your initial diary to your second diary to note the improvements in voiding intervals and voided volumes—this process reinforces the bladder training process.
Posted on: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 17:16:12 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015