Almost half of older women suffer from urinary incontinence, but many of them did not speak about it with your doctor, shows a large survey conducted in the United States. These data were published along with other results of the National survey on healthy aging (National Poll on Healthy Ageing).
The NDB was held in March 2018 Institute for policy in health and innovation, University of Michigan (University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation) and the Medical center of the University of Michigan (Michigan Medicine).
The survey of more than 1,000 women aged from 50 to 80 years, answered questions about bladder control. As it turned out, 43% of women aged 50 to 60 years have problems with urinary incontinence, and 65 years and older, the number had increased to 51%.
However, two thirds of them had not discussed the issue with the doctor, and only 38% said that doing special exercises Kegel to strengthen the pelvic floor muscles that help prevent involuntary urination.
Urinary incontinence is a common disorder that can not be detected on routine physical examination, but may affect the quality of life and health of women and usually responds to treatment, explained Dr. Carolyn Swenson (Carolyn Swenson), Urogynecology from the University of Michigan, who participated in the development of questions and analysis of the results.
Among women who said that faced with the expiration of urine, 41% identified this as a problem or serious problem. A third of them is the leakage of urine occurs almost daily.
According to the survey, most women tried to cope with the problem by themselves found ways from using pads or special underwear to wear dark clothes and limit fluid intake. Almost half of the women concerned, that will eventually become worse.
It is not an inevitable part of aging and cannot be ignored, said Carolyn Swenson.
The most common reason urinary leakage are coughing or sneezing (79%), attempts to get to the bathroom (64%), laughter (49%) and exercise (37%).
The last thing older women should do is to avoid exercise or not be able to enjoy other activities that make life meaningful, said the head of the poll, Professor Preti Malani (Malani Preeti). We hope that these results will help to stimulate conversation between women and their clinicians to their activity does not become limited.
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