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From new mothers to grandmothers, many women experience urinary leakage, but there is hope. UCPA’s new OAB Patient Navigator and Care Pathway are here to help.

As a new mom, your body experienced significant changes to grow, deliver and care for your baby. Feeling tired, losing hair and having some mild, infrequent urinary leaking or incontinence are normal for a short time after giving birth. Continued “accidents” are not normal though and they can be extremely embarrassing.

Many times, leaking or accidents during pregnancy is due to stress urinary incontinence (SUI). Increased pressure on the bladder due to a growing uterus strains the bladder and the bladder sphincter causing stress incontinence. Following birth, women with stress incontinence may leak urine when sneezing, laughing or doing strenuous physical activities. This could be due to weak pelvic floor muscles or there may be another kind of incontinence happening – an overactive bladder or OAB.

More than half of women with stress urinary incontinence also have an overactive bladder.

Overactive Bladder

An overactive bladder is a condition with symptoms that include urinary urgency, frequency and possibly urinary leakage. Spasms of the bladder muscles cause you to feel like you must urinate often and quickly, even though there may not be much urine in your bladder. Those spasms may be due to muscles that are too active, inappropriate nerve signals between the bladder and the brain, hormone changes, pelvic floor weakness, neurological disorders or a urinary tract infection (UTI).

The main symptoms of an overactive bladder include a sudden, strong urge to go that you cannot ignore, going to the bathroom more than eight times in 24 hours, and waking up more than once a night to go.

Overactive bladder is very common. More than 40 percent of women have OAB, but many do not seek help due to embarrassment. They are not sure how to talk with their health care provider or they think there are not treatments that will help.

People suffer physically, emotionally and socially from OAB due to its distressing effects. Those with OAB may limit social interactions, employment opportunities, trips outside of the home and develop social isolation and depression. It may affect exercise, your sleep and your sex life. OAB may also cause skin problems or infections.

There are many options to help those suffering from overactive bladder.

Urology of Central Pennsylvania offers our patients a new service to ease the embarrassment and fix the problem of an overactive bladder. This new service is called our OAB Patient Navigator program. When a patient chooses to use the complimentary OAB Patient Navigator, a personal Nurse Navigator will call her regularly to: explain and answer questions about her diagnosis, coordinate communication between the patient and physician, guide the patient through the next steps toward significant improvement and facilitate scheduling treatments.

Your Nurse Navigator will help to guide you through the OAB Care Pathway, from evaluation to conservative treatments to re-evaluation and more invasive treatment, if needed. Please click on the thumbnail of the Care Pathway to read more.

Remember, frequency, urgency and leaking urine is not normal for new moms, older moms or grand moms and there is something you can do about it.

Improve your quality of life starting today by calling Urology of Central Pennsylvania today at 717-724-0720 or 717-763-1174.

More information on Overactive Bladder may be found via the links below:
“Incontinence Relief is Now Coming from a Surprising Source – Botox” PennLive article – https://www.urologycp.com/2015/07/09/incontinence-relief-is-now-coming-from-a-surprising-source-botox/

Overactive Bladder in Men – https://www.urologycp.com/urology/male/overactive-bladder/

Urology Care Foundation OAB Information (Foundation of the American Urological Association) – https://www.urologyhealth.org/urologic-conditions/overactive-bladder-(oab)