Incontinence

Being confined to bed can be tough on both the patient and the caregiver.  The good news is that there are bedridden aids that make daily care much easier on everyone.

A report done with the objective of investigating “the impact of urinary incontinence (UI) on health-related quality of life (QOL)…and to compare UI and non-UI elderly Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in managed care plans on the prevalence of depression and self-rated health” came to a fairly predictable conclusion.

If you live with urinary incontinence, you should not resign yourself to it as a fact of life or sign of aging. While all people experiencing urinary incontinence experience it as a lack of bladder control resulting in some level of urinary leakage, it is usually a symptom of something else. In other words, it is a symptom of a larger condition.

If you are eager to understand more about the condition known as “stress incontinence,” you must first understand the more general meaning of incontinence. Generally, incontinence is defined as an “inability of the body to control the evacuative functions of urination or defecation : partial or complete loss of bladder or bowel control”.

Urinary incontinence is often described with words like “embarrassing” or “uncontrollable,” and these terms are part of the reason that almost all types of urinary incontinence fail to be reported quickly. In fact, it is not unusual for someone with symptoms of urinary leakage to wait an average of six years before consulting with a medical professional about it.

A 2014 report from the Centers for Disease Control entitled “Prevalence of Incontinence Among Older Americans,” detailed some surprising statistics. However, the report used a data set that made it impossible to supply any sort of averages because the data was sourced from:

It might be surprising to learn that 51% of women, overall, live with urinary incontinence. And though the numbers increase with age (a recent study determined it occurred at “13% in young, nulligravid women to 25% in reproductive-age, 47% in middle-age, 55% in postmenopausal, and 75% in older women“), it was around double the rate experienced by men.

When there is anything going on with the bladder, it can be difficult to determine just what the problem might be, and it is because so many issues involve identical symptoms. As an example, those with overactive bladders may find that they can “no longer hold urine normally…[and] often feel a sudden urge to urinate or experience an accident.”

Incontinence is the inability to completely control the bladder or bowels. Any type of incontinence will occur by degrees from mild to severe and will have an array of causes. Urinary incontinence, though most common among women, occurs in men and manifests in different ways, as well. The National Association for Continence indicates that in the U.S. alone there are more than 20 million people dealing with some sort of incontinence, and this explains the huge array of incontinence products available.

What is ‘Confitex’?