Urinary Incontinence Explained

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

Duration : 2 minutes and 20 seconds

Urinary incontinence is the involuntary loss or leaking of urine. And of course, nobody wants to leak urine.

There are different types of urinary incontinence and it's really important to be able to know the difference because we treat them differently. One type is called stress or urinary incontinence This is much more common in women and is essentially caused by physical stress on the bladder, so if you cough, laugh or sneeze, bend over to do some activity such as jump at the gym, and you leak urine. It’s called stress incontinence because you're putting stress or pressure stress onto your bladder. If the bladder doesn't have adequate support at the bladder neck of the urethra, that's when a leak of urine is experienced. And that's again much more much more common in women.

The other type of incontinence is called urgency incontinence. This is leakage of urine associated with for example, an overactive bladder. Overactive bladder is described as urinary urgency, or the sudden desire to go to the bathroom immediately without much warning. In fact, if you have such a strong bladder contraction and strong urgency, you may not even get to the bathroom in time, and you may have leakage of urine associated with this urgency. This type of incontinence is treated very differently than stress incontinence.

To make things even more confusing, some people will have a mix of these two types. They'll have both urgency incontinence and stress incontinence which we have to try to tease apart. Finally, there's a sort of rare incontinence called overflow incontinence. If your bladder is not squeezing well and you're you're holding a lot of urine, your bladder can get so full, that it actually overflows. You can have leakage of urine because your bladder is not emptying. These are the different types of incontinence and of course, they're typically treated differently based upon the cause. Men can develop both urgency and stress incontinence, though it's far more common for men to have that urgency incontinence, overactive bladder, whereas women can equally have stress or urgency incontinence.

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

Local Practitioners: Urologist