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Overactive
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not of overactive bladders (OAB). (To be perfectly honest, though, I don’t really know whether my friends have BPH or OAB because, hey, we’re guys, after all, so we never talk to each other about our health; I just know they visit the washroom an unseemly number of times during ball games).
.... OAB has nothing to do with the prostate, however. Rather, OAB is that condition in which the bladder contracts suddenly, resulting in the urgent need to pee (oddly enough, doctors call that symptom “urgency”), which in turn can result in what doctors call episodes of urinary incontinence but which parents call “accidents” when they occur in kids. OAB is also known as “urge incontinence”. (Urge incontinence is different, by the way, from stress incontinence, which occurs during activities such as laughing, sneezing, and physical exercise, and which is not accompanied by urgency).
.... OAB is common. Surveys reveal that anywhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 11 adults over the age of 40 suffers from OAB, although most experts feel this is probably a significant underestimate because lots of people with leaky bladders are too shy to admit their problem to a health professional, never mind to a pesky, probing researcher. Indeed, a recent study found that only about 50 % of people with OAB felt easy |
.... “So what else is new?” my wife snorted when I told her the topic for this month’s column. “Just like always, you’re writing about yourself and your friends. Typical self-absorbed egotist male chauvinist,” she added and stormed off, no doubt to call her sister.
.... Egotist? Moi? Hardly, I wanted to say to her directly, although I didn’t since that would have meant 1) I sleep on the couch that night and 2) that I would have to turn away from the mirror where I was busily admiring my profile. Great brow ridges, don’t you agree?
.... Anyway, that woman’s retort just goes to show you how little my wife really understands about medicine.
.... You see, just because I had said that this column was going to cover the topic of overactive bladders (OAB), she immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was all about my aging men friends’ and my own need (to use a technical term, which I can do because I’m a doctor, after all) to pee as often as we do, since mes amis and I have all clearly begun to feel the inevitable sting of a gradually enlarging prostate gland resulting in symptoms all too familiar to guys of a certain age (not to mention, too, to the women who love them – or not):
• difficulty starting to void
• difficulty emptying the bladder
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• trouble controlling the urinary
stream
• post-void dribbling, and
• the need to urinate more often,
especially at night and after imbibing too much fluid, which these
days for me is anything more than
four sips of any liquid, and two sips
of coffee, my diuretic of choice.
(By the way, this constellation of symptoms that are the fate of nearly all men who live long enough clearly proves to me that God is a young female with a terrible sense of humour, but that’s not a subject I’m going to discuss today).
.... But what my wife fails to understand with her scanty medical knowledge is that for my friends et moi, our symptoms are the result of benign prostate hyperplasia (BPH) |
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