Many incontinent women don't find wetting a problem

OB/GYN News, Nov 15, 2001 by Bruce Jancin

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA -- Half of women over age 45 in a recent survey reported experiencing urinary incontinence, but only a minority considered it a problem in their daily activities, Dr. Graham Swanson reported at WONCA 2001, the conference of the World Organization of Family Doctors.

The likelihood that a woman considered accidental wetting to be a problem varied markedly depending upon the type of urinary incontinence she had. Among women with stress incontinence, 18% described wetting as a problem in their daily activities, as did 20.5% of those with urge incontinence and 51.9% of those with mixed incontinence, said Dr. Swanson, a family physician at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ont.

He reported on a survey of 606 randomly sampled Canadian women over age 45 who attended one of two family medicine clinics. Overall, 51% said that they experienced accidental wetting.

Women who described incontinence as a problem tended to see themselves as having poor health and becoming sick more easily than women who didn't view their wetting as a problem.

Women with urinary incontinence were 2.78-fold more likely than continent women to see themselves as getting sick more often or more easily than other people, but incontinent women who viewed their wetting as a problem were 8.26-fold more likely to describe themselves in those terms, compared with women who didn't consider their accidental wetting to be a problem.

Incontinent women who described wetting as a problem in their daily activities also were significantly more likely to report being troubled by headaches, constipation, and swollen ankles than those who didn't view their accidental wetting as a problem, Dr. Swanson said.

Women who had ever given birth were 59% more likely to report accidental wetting than nulliparous women. But among women with urinary incontinence, those who had given birth were only half as likely as those who were nulliparous to view their accidental wetting as a problem.