What are the Symptoms of Over... Video Transcript

Participants

, Diane K. Newman RNC, MSN, , Sandip Vasavada , Gabrielle Morris MD

Summary

Frequent urges to urinate can be the result of overactive bladder (OAB). This is called urinary urgency. People with OAB can also find they have more than the urge to urinate; they actually need to urinate often. This is called urinary frequency. Incontinence can also be a problem. And people with OAB can experience nocturia, which means they need to get up frequently at night, to go to the bathroom.

Webcast Transcript

DIANE NEWMAN, RNC, MSN: Persons with overactive bladder experience several different symptoms.

The first one is urgency, urinary urgency. That is when you have an intense, sudden desire to have to go to the bathroom immediately. You really cannot defer this symptom, and what we find people doing is rushing to get to that bathroom as soon as possible, because that urgency is so intense.

The second symptom of overactive bladder is urinary frequency. That means when you go to the bathroom too often. The usual number of times it's normal is less than eight times, day and night. So it's someone that's going more frequently, like maybe every two hours, every hour and a half.

Many times, patients will have both urgency and frequency and they'll go to the bathroom even more frequently, because they're afraid that they may have a wetting accident or they may have incontinence. That's the third symptom that can occur, urinary urge incontinence. And that means that you have that strong urge and you really don't make it to the bathroom. You'll leak urine on the way to the bathroom and, many times, patients will say they sometimes won't even make the effort to go, because they know they're going to wet themselves.

Persons with overactive bladder may have nocturia once or twice at night, which means that the urge wakes them up and they have to go to the bathroom. What's disturbing about this symptom for people -- and they'll often report this -- is that it interrupts their sleep and then they're tired during the day. So this is a really bad symptom. Patients say it really adversely affects quality of life, their daytime work, their ability to function during the day, because they're up at night going to the bathroom.

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