If urinary incontinence is affecting your daily life, it’s crucial to seek professional help. Managing this condition effectively requires a combination of lifestyle changes, behavioural techniques, medications, and medical devices.
Urinary incontinence, the loss of bladder control, is a common and often embarrassing issue. It can range in severity from occasional urine leaks when you cough or sneeze to a sudden, intense urge to urinate that prevents you from reaching the toilet in time. While it becomes more frequent with age, it is not an inevitable part of ageing. If urinary incontinence is disrupting your daily life, it’s important to consult a specialist like Dr Ashish Sabharwal, one of the best urologists in Delhi. Fortunately, many people find relief through simple lifestyle and dietary adjustments or medications. Read on to discover various ways to manage urinary incontinence.
How to Treat Urinary Incontinence?
Depending on the type of urinary incontinence you experience, your doctor may suggest one or more approaches to deal with the problem. These can include lifestyle changes, behavioural techniques, medications, and medical devices.
1. Lifestyle Changes
You can potentially reduce urinary incontinence (UI) leaks by making several lifestyle adjustments:
- Adjust Your Fluid Intake: Consult your doctor about your fluid intake. You may need to drink less during the day but avoid dehydration. Your doctor can recommend how much and when to drink based on your health, activities, and climate. To reduce going to bathroom at nighttime, consider stopping liquid intake a few hours before bed if advised by your doctor.
- Maintain a Healthy Weight: Being overweight or obese increases your risk of UI and other conditions like diabetes. Losing weight can help reduce leaks, and preventing weight gain may help avoid UI. Research indicates that a higher body mass index (BMI) correlates with an increased likelihood of leaks.
- Exercise Regularly: Regular physical activity is crucial for weight management and overall health, even if you have UI. High-impact exercises and sit-ups can pressure pelvic floor muscles and increase leaks. Instead, engage in low-impact exercises like pilates to strengthen your core and pelvic floor muscles, which can help relieve stress incontinence.
- Stop Smoking: Quitting smoking benefits both your bladder health and overall well-being. Smoking can lead to chronic coughing, which increases the risk of stress incontinence.
- Adjust Your Diet: Spicy and acidic foods, such as citrus fruits and curries, can irritate the bladder and exacerbate incontinence symptoms. Caffeine, particularly from coffee, can also worsen incontinence. Consider switching to decaffeinated options and reducing intake of fizzy drinks, green tea, energy drinks, tea and hot chocolate. Replace these with water and herbal or fruit teas.
- Engage in Pelvic Floor Muscle Exercises: Your doctor may recommend performing exercises frequently to strengthen the muscles that control urination. Known as Kegel exercises, these techniques are particularly effective for stress incontinence but can also benefit those with urge incontinence.
2. Behavioural Techniques
Your doctor may recommend several behavioural techniques to help manage urinary incontinence:
- Bladder Training: This technique involves delaying urination after you feel the urge to go. Begin by attempting to hold off for 10 minutes each time you feel the urge. The aim is to gradually extend the time between bathroom trips until you are urinating only every 2.5 to 3.5 hours.
- Double Voiding: Double voiding involves urinating, waiting a few minutes, and then trying to urinate again. This method helps you empty your bladder more completely, reducing the risk of overflow incontinence.
- Scheduled Toilet Trips: Instead of waiting for the urge to urinate, this technique involves going to the bathroom at regular intervals, typically every two to four hours. This can help manage UI by preventing the bladder from becoming too full.
3. Medications
Urgency incontinence can be managed with medications such as beta-3 agonists, anticholinergics, and tricyclic antidepressants, available in liquid, pill, or patch form to help relax the bladder. For cases where other treatments fail, doctors might use botulinum toxin A (Botox) by injecting it into the bladder to relax it, thereby increasing its capacity and reducing urine leaks. Additionally, men with urgency incontinence due to an enlarged prostate might be prescribed 5-alpha reductase inhibitors, alpha-blockers, or phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitors.
4. Medical Devices
Your doctor may suggest the use of the following medical devices to help manage urine leaks:
- Catheter: For managing overflow incontinence, a catheter may be necessary to empty the bladder, and your health care professional will guide you on its proper use.
- Pessary: Women with stress incontinence might benefit from a pessary, a soft plastic device inserted into the vagina. The pessary applies pressure to the vaginal wall and nearby urethra, helping reduce leaks by supporting the urethra.
- Urethral Insert: This small, tampon-like device is inserted into your urethra before activities likely to cause incontinence, such as tennis, acting as a plug to prevent leakage and removed before urination.
Addressing urinary incontinence can greatly improve your quality of life. Dealing with urinary incontinence involves a combination of lifestyle changes, behavioural techniques, medications, and medical devices, tailored to the type and severity of the condition. For personalised treatment and expert advice, schedule a consultation with Dr Ashish Sabharwal, one of the best urologists in Delhi, via Apollo.