Incontinent girls may suffer overactive bladder later

Women who had urinary problems as children are more likely to have overactive bladder as adults, a new study shows.

The findings suggest that treating childhood urinary symptoms could prevent such problems in adulthood, Dr. Mary Pat Fitzgerald of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois and colleagues say.

The researchers surveyed 2,109 women aged 40 to 69, asking them about current urinary problems as well as whether they had such problems in childhood. Twenty-nine percent of the women reported having urinary incontinence, or leakage of urine, at least once a week, while 12 percent had daily incontinence.

Women who reported urinary frequency during childhood were twice as likely to experience urgency as adults, while those who wet the bed as children were more than twice as likely to do so as adults.

Women who reported having had both daytime and nighttime incontinence in childhood were more than twice as likely to have urge incontinence as adults. Fitzgerald and her colleagues found no link between stress incontinence in adulthood and any childhood urinary symptoms.

Urge incontinence is an inability to control urination that is accompanied by a feeling of needing to urinate, as opposed to stress incontinence, which occurs when coughing, sneezing, lifting, exercise or other physical activities cause urine leakage.

The researchers also found that women who had experienced urinary tract infections in childhood were more than twice as likely to have them as adults.

The connection between childhood urinary symptoms and adult symptoms of overactive bladder (OAB) “raises the possibility of early identification of a population at risk for adult OAB symptoms,” Fitzgerald and her colleagues write.

“If further studies confirm these observations, prevention or early intervention may be possible, reducing the significant burden of adult OAB,” they add.

SOURCE: The Journal of Urology, March 2006.

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