How to treat different types of urinary incontinence

According to the International Continence Society (ICS), incontinence is considered to be any involuntary loss of urine. It is a very frequent disorder and entails a great loss of quality of life.

Causes and Types of Urinary Incontinence

Causes of urinary incontinence are multiple, and should be divided as they affect men or women.

• In men , the bladder is affected by the suffering it experiences in the context of a prostate disease that appears with age. Well because of bladder overexertion, or because of lesions caused after treating prostate diseases, the truth is that the prevalence of incontinence in men can reach 30% at 65 years.
• With respect to women, we found three types of incontinence fundamentally. Almost 15% of the female population will present urinary incontinence at some point, so it is a malfunction of the bladder that conditions incontinence, generating urgent urination when the patient does not want, and therefore causing incontinence in some grade. It is more frequent the greater the patient.
• Secondly, there is also incontinence of effort, which occurs when the urethra is unable to hold the urine, and is clearly related to childbirth.
• Of course, there is also mixed incontinence, which is a mixture of stress incontinence and stress incontinence.

How to Treat Urinary Incontinence

The treatment of urinary incontinence is divided into three parts, which can be mixed together:

• Pelvic Floor Rehabilitation: When the incontinence is moderate or mild, a good rehabilitation done consistently, well taught and followed, is able to cure the incontinence of many women, both of urgency and effort. And if it is not cured, it will at least improve and make other therapeutic options work better.
• Pharmacological treatment: by means of drugs that try to regulate the bladder, it is also achieved the cure of urge incontinence. These drugs are of two fundamental types, anticholinergic and beta3 agonists. All are oral, with acceptable tolerance and fairly effective. For rebellious cases, there is also the placement of botulinum toxin within the bladder or the use of nerve stimulators that help control bladder contraction.
• Surgery : fundamentally, it involves stress or mixed incontinence with a strong effort component. Surgery is based on supporting (through meshes or grafts of another type) to the urethra so that it contracts better and is able to avoid the escape with the effort. The use of the vaginal laser for this type of incontinence begins to give some results, but must be considered quasi experimental.

Exercises to prevent urinary incontinence

There are several exercises (the popular ones of Kegel are one of them) that can help, but the fundamental thing of these exercises is that they indicate them and it teaches a professional. Doing them improperly can aggravate incontinence or even generate new injuries.

For more information consult a urologist.