Female Urinary Incontinence
Urinary incontinence is the involuntary leakage of urine. There are several types of urinary incontinence.
- Stress Incontinence: Women often experience stress incontinence after giving birth. This type of incontinence is associated with coughing, sneezing, laughing, or exercising.
- Urge Incontinence: Women who suffer from urge incontinence have a sudden strong urge to urinate, but bladder contractions occur before they can make it to the bathroom.
- Overflow Incontinence: Overflow incontinence occurs when the bladder fills up but doesn’t empty, and the urine overflows beyond what the bladder can hold
- Overactive Bladder (OAB): OAB is a sensation of urinary urgency that drives people to the bathroom multiple times a day. This may or may not be accompanied by urge incontinence.
- Mixed Incontinence: Mixed incontinence is a combination of more than one type of incontinence, usually stress and urge.
Treatments
- Prescription medications: anticholinergics or beta-agonists can help with overactive bladder (OAB) and may be helpful for urge incontinence.
- Periurethral bulking: involves injecting hydrogel into the area where the bladder meets the urethra to narrow the urethra and reduce leakage.
- Botox® injections to the bladder
- The Burch procedure: a surgery to improve stress incontinence
- Sacral neuromodulation: the surgical implantation of a pacemaker-like device to electrically stimulate the bladder and restore normal communication between the brain and the bladder and/or bowel.
- Percutaneous tibial nerve stimulation: an acupuncture type therapy performed in the office to improve overactive bladder. A small needle is placed in the ankle to stimulate a peripheral nerve that electrically restores communication between the nervous system and the bladder.
- Sling procedures: surgery to support the neck of the bladder in women with stress incontinence.
- Pelvic floor muscle rehabilitation: using a vaginal electronic probe to enhance coordination and strengthening of the pelvic floor muscles to treat vaginal pain, sexual pain, urinary dysfunction and bowel dysfunction.
