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Biofeedback for Urinary Incontinence

Do you sometimes lose urine before you can reach the toilet?

By Richa PattanaikPublished 3 years ago 11 min read
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Lose urine before reaching toilet?

• Have you started planning your life around having quick access to a toilet?

• Do you stay home more often for fear of losing bladder control when you’re out?

• Do you bring a change of underwear with you when you go out?

• Do you have to wear a pad or an “incontinence briefs”?

If you answer “Yes” to one or more of these questions, you already know that you have urinary, or bladder, incontinence. But do you know that over 13 million women and men of all ages in the U.S. experience incontinence?

Do you know that, in most cases, it is highly treatable? If you’re an older adult, do you know that incontinence is NOT an inevitable fact of life and that it can be overcome? Many people keep their incontinence a secret and consequently never learn of the help that is out there.

Types of urinary incontinence not usually due to medical conditions:

• Stress Incontinence

• Urge Incontinence or Hyperactive Bladder

• Mixed Incontinence

• Overflow Incontinence

• Functional Incontinence

• Enuresis, or Bedwetting or Night-time wetting

• Transient Incontinence, or acute incontinence

Psychological Issues in Incontinence

Psychological or emotional problems may not play any role in the onset or continuation of your incontinence, although psychologically-minded women may search for such problems. However, once incontinence is chronically present in your life, it is very difficult not to be affected psychologically and socially. Incontinence limits your activities, you’re planning for the future and your sense of yourself. I have known many women and men who organize their careers and their lives around their need to be close to a bathroom at all times.

Socializing and, especially, intimacy often suffer. You are out of control of your bladder and this may lead you to feel out of control of your life. Some women suffer extreme embarrassment and keep their incontinence a secret from everyone, perhaps even their doctor. Older women, especially, fear that revealing their incontinence will cause others to think that they have become cognitively impaired. Sadly, this is sometimes the response they get – quite mistakenly. The truly impaired person is usually not overly concerned about her incontinence. The tragedy is that staying silent keeps people from getting the help that is out there.

In some women and men, psychological issues may play a role in the origin of their incontinence. This is more frequently the case in pelvic pain, but can sometimes be the case in incontinence. Keeping pelvic muscles chronically tense can occur after a trauma involving the pelvic area. The trauma may be past sexual abuse or some other trauma or pain affecting the pelvic area. Holding tension in these muscles is a protective mechanism that has become unconscious and outlives its usefulness. Because of the high-tension level in the muscles, the small sensations that indicate that the bladder is full cannot be perceived. Only when these sensations are extreme and very urgent can the person take note of them. By then, it may be too late to reach a toilet.

Even when overly tense muscles are identified as the problem, it may be difficult to release the tension without becoming frightened. After all, tension has become a way of feeling protected and safe or of warding off unwelcome sensations. It is important for the person treating you to understand this and to allow you to change at your own pace.

Whether psychological concerns play a major role or only a secondary and minor role in your incontinence, seek professional help from someone who is not only knowledgeable about treatment, but is empathic, supportive and non-judgmental. You need to feel comfortable talking with this person and sharing the information needed to help you

Psychological Issues of Incontinence

Evaluation

If you have not already done so, you should be evaluated by a physician who is experienced with women’s urinary tract conditions and incontinence. An internist, family physician or nurse practitioner is often the first person consulted. If a specialist is needed, you will probably be referred to a gynaecologist, urogynecologist (a gynaecologist who specializes in urinary problems in women), or urologist.

Your doctor will ask you about your symptoms, the history of the problem, your medical history and the medications you may be taking. You will get an examination to see if there are any medical conditions that are causing or contributing to the problem. Infections, cystoceles and nerve impingement are examples of such problems. The physical examination can also determine if there is serious muscle weakness. If the cause is not apparent after these things are done, you will probably be given various laboratory tests. Blood tests, ultrasound and urodynamics (the study of how the urine flows) are examples of these tests.

Treatment

An accurate diagnosis of the cause of your incontinence is necessary to determine appropriate treatment. The important thing to know is that there is something that can be done, whatever the cause may be. Don’t accept living with something that limits your life. There are two categories of treatments:

• Behavioural Methods

• Non-behavioural, medical methods

As a psychologist, I specialize in the behavioural treatment of incontinence, so this article will primarily address this category.

Behavioural Methods of Treating Urinary Incontinence

The Agency for Health Care Policy and Research of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has published guidelines for treating urinary incontinence. (The guidelines for medical treatment are outdated now, but the behavioural methods remain fairly current.) The Agency recommends behavioural methods as a first treatment of choice, in most instances, before more invasive treatments are used. “Behavioural methods” refers to such things as biofeedback and pelvic muscle exercises, bladder retraining and dietary changes — in other words, treatment that focuses on behaviours, rather than medicine or surgery.

Pelvic Muscle Retraining and Biofeedback.

Most women experience incontinence because of pelvic floor muscle problems. These include the external muscles of the “floor” of the pelvic area and the internal sphincter muscles that control the release of urine. Examples of pelvic muscle problems are:

• Muscle weakness

• Lack of coordination of the involved muscles

• Use of the wrong set of muscles when urinating or trying to hold back urine.

Often these muscle problems are the sole cause of the incontinence. However, even if another medical condition exists, pelvic floor muscle problems may contribute to its severity.

Pelvic muscle retraining consists of strengthening these muscles and helping them regain their normal pattern of use. We’re all familiar with strength training for other muscles of the body – we go to the gym or do repetitions with weights to strengthen muscles such as the biceps or the quadriceps. Pelvic muscle strength training is no different. By the use of repetitive exercises, called Kegel exercises, these muscles can be strengthened. And if the normal, coordinated pattern of use of all the muscles involved in urinating or holding back urine has been lost, then this can retrained.

It is generally very difficult to do this strengthening and retraining properly just by “thinking” and trying. Often, what feels “right” is actually the old pattern. This is where biofeedback comes in.

Biofeedback. When used for continence training, biofeedback measures muscle tension in the pelvic muscles and other muscles affecting the ability to hold back urine. To pick up the muscle signals, a tampon-shaped sensor is inserted into the vagina. Sensors are usually placed on the abdomen as well. These sensors relay information about the degree of weakness or strength in the muscles to a computer monitor for viewing.

In this way, you can become aware of what the involved muscles are doing and exactly how they respond when you try to relax or tighten them. With this awareness, and with practice, you can learn to strengthen the muscles and to use muscles in the proper pattern. You don’t have to guess whether your exercises are working or not. You can see it, and you can see the strength increasing from session to session.

Many studies have shown that biofeedback is a highly effective treatment for incontinence when the incontinence is caused by muscles that are too weak to hold back urine. The research in this area is so compelling that Medicare began reimbursing for biofeedback for incontinence in both women and men. (Because the Medicare standard is so high, many insurance companies now follow their lead and reimburse, also.)

How long it takes to achieve continence depends on just how weak your muscles are and on how diligent you are at doing the strengthening practice between sessions. Typically, only six to ten office sessions are needed. At first they are weekly, as you gain awareness of the muscles and learn how to control them. Then sessions are spaced further and further apart as you learn how to do the Kegel exercises and the muscle use patterns correctly without the visual feedback and the guidance from the therapist.

Electrical Stimulation. Another form of therapy done via a sensor in the vagina is electrical stimulation (or “e-stim”, for short). In this case, the sensor delivers a mild electrical stimulation to the muscles. This is a form of passive Kegel exercises – the sensor does the contracting and releasing for you. In my opinion, electrical stimulation is not comparable to biofeedback in effect or in results. However, it may be a good starting point for women with very, very weak muscles who have difficulty identifying and contracting the involved pelvic floor muscles without this assistance.

Bladder Retraining. Along with pelvic muscle retraining with biofeedback, many people need to learn a new schedule of urinating. You may have gotten into the habit of using the toilet very frequently, in the hope that by emptying the bladder often, you’ll be less prone to an accident. But this trains the brain and the bladder to “need to go” when there is actually very little in the bladder to empty. As the muscles get stronger, you can train your bladder to signal you only when you really need to empty it. Just as we teach our body to feel hungry or sleepy at certain times of the day by the routines we keep, we can teach it to signal us to urinate when the bladder is full.

Dietary Changes. Many foods are bladder stimulants. Caffeine is an obvious one, but so are alcohol, sugars, citrus and spicy foods. If you have a food allergy, it probably triggers bladder irritability. I have found that wheat is a culprit for some women. Each woman is affected by a different set of dietary bladder stimulants, so you must experiment with eliminating one suspect at a time. And some women do not appear to be affected by foods at all.

Exercise and smoking cessation. High impact exercise such as running is thought to increase the likelihood of weakening pelvic floor muscles. If you like this type of exercise, though, don’t quit. Just get those muscles strengthened. While they’re getting stronger, use bladder pads, if necessary, when exercising. Low impact exercises such as walking, cycling, etc., do not have this effect. And some women find that smoking increases their symptoms. If you smoke, this can be an added incentive to stop!

Biofeedback.

Non-Behavioural Methods of Treating Urinary Incontinence

If these non-invasive, behavioural treatments don’t give satisfactory results or if your condition is clearly more organic in nature, other kinds of treatment may be considered by your doctor. Because I do not provide these treatments, I will only list some of them here.

They include medications, pessaries (a ring inserted into the vagina that helps to keep the urethra positioned correctly to reduce stress leakage), use of a catheter (a tube inserted through the urethra into the bladder to drain urine from the bladder) and several types of surgery. You can learn more about them from www.kidney.niddk.nih.gov or from www.ucsf.edu/wcc/. Obviously, the appropriate treatment for you must be determined and performed by someone who specializes in pelvic floor and incontinence disorders. Often these treatments are used along with behavioral techniques.

I hope this article has helped you realize that you are NOT alone with this problem and that the chances are very good that you can eliminate it. Usually, women don’t want to talk about this to other people. But when the topic does come up in a group of woman of any age, you would be surprised at how many have, or have had, incontinence to a greater or lesser degree. Talk about it with your health care professional and if the first thing you try doesn’t work, try something else. There IS something that will help.

Further Information

Pelvic floor muscle biofeedback is a specialized form of biofeedback requiring special sensors and training. Most biofeedback providers do not provide this type of biofeedback.

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About the Creator

Richa Pattanaik

Like a complex wine, she is alternately sweet, tart, sparkling & mellow. She is both maternal and playful. Assured, alluring, and resourceful.

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