Incontinence is a medical condition that affects millions of people, making them unable to hold urine in their bladder.
While incontinence can affect anyone at any point in life, it is a much more common problem among women.
Female incontinence may be an embarrassing condition, but it is also usually very easy to cure.
In order to properly treat your incontinence, we must first find the cause of your problem.
The most common cause of female incontinence is stress and pressure on the pelvic floor muscles. This pressure on the pelvic floor muscles is commonly caused by childbirth and weight gain.
This extra pressure forces the bladder further down in your body, which makes it harder to tighten the muscles needed to close the urethra.
The inability to close the urethra will cause it to leak urine when coughing, sneezing, laughing and several other common activities.
Another common cause of female incontinence is urge incontinence, which happens when urine pushes out of the bladder when the bladder muscle involuntarily contracts.
Common causes of urge incontinence are stress, severe brain conditions, overactive bladder or an irritation to the bladder.
Urge incontinence usually brings a strong and sudden need to urinate. Since there is not much time to get to the bathroom, some urine is leaked too soon.
Behavioral methods and exercises will be the first treatment used to try to cure your female incontinence. A bladder training schedule is commonly used to try and cure urge incontinence.
You will then slowly increase the amount of time between urinating, which should help retrain your body to know exactly when you need to release the urine in your bladder.
Kegel exercises are a treatment option if your incontinence is caused by stress on the pelvic floor muscles. Performing these exercises should help rebuild the strength in your pelvic floor muscles.
Once the strength is returned to these muscles, you should be able to properly control the flow of your urine.
If neither of these home treatment options is not able to cure your female incontinence, then you may require medication or surgery for your condition.
There are several difference medications available that can treat stress or urge incontinence. Combining the medication with the behavioral training and exercises should cure most cases of female incontinence.
If your incontinence problem is extremely severe and does not respond to the other treatment options, then surgery may be your final option.
Surgery will only be able to cure female incontinence associated with pelvic floor muscle stress, so surgery is not an option for urge incontinence.
The surgery will lift your bladder and urethra back to their normal positions. This will take all of the extra pressure off of your pelvic floor muscles. Since the pressure is removed from these muscles, you will not have any more urine leakage.
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You don’t have to suffer from incontinence any longer. Contact South Lake Obstetrics & Gynecology today to make an appointment.