What is an Overactive Bladder?

Dr. Dean Elterman, MD, MSc, FRCSC Urological Surgeon

Duration: 2 minute 27 seconds

Overactive bladder is the sudden feeling of really needing to go to the bathroom to urinate almost immediately. These main symptoms can include urgency, which is when you have to rush to the bathroom.

People can often have something called urinary frequency, which means you have to go many times in a day. We can quantify this as approximately eight or more times in a 24 hour period.

And we also have some people who wake up at night with the urgency to urinate and this is called nocturia.

Finally, some people can even have leakage associated with urgency and that's called urgency and comment. In other words, you get that sudden urgency to rush to the bathroom and in fact, you don't make it in time and you start to leak urine.

We know that overactive bladder actually happens in both men and women at fairly equal rates. We often associate an overactive bladder as a female condition, and an enlarged prostate with men. But in fact, both men and women can develop an overactive bladder.

Most of the time overactive bladder just develops on its own with no known cause. You could get it as a younger person, but it certainly becomes more common as we get older. In the general population, approximately 12% of Canadians will have an overactive bladder. If we specifically look at people over the age of 65, about 1/3 of them may meet the criteria for having an overactive bladder, which bumps the number up to 30%.

So men can develop an overactive bladder independently just like women, but they can also develop an overactive bladder as a secondary phenomenon after having an enlarge prostate. So when the prostate is enlarged, it can cause an obstruction of flow of urine. And over time, the bladder has to work harder and harder to try and get the pee out to push out the urine past the enlarged prostate. Eventually over time the bladder can start to become dysfunctional. To summarize, overactive bladder is a very common condition. And it's really defined as this sudden need to urinate urgently, and it can happen to both men and women.

Presenter: Dr. Dean Elterman, Urologist, Toronto, ON

Local Practitioners: Urologist