You love to laugh, but now it often comes with some urinary leakage, never mind a sneeze that pushes urine right out.
These are just two of the many scenarios where stress urinary incontinence can show up in your life, and you’re tired of the unwelcome development.
The first thing we want you to know is that you’re not alone. Nearly two-thirds of adult women in the United States report urinary incontinence, with stress urinary incontinence leading the charge.
If you want to regain control of your bladder and your quality of life, Dr. Fernando Otero and the team here at Women’s Clinic of the Rio Grande Valley assure you that there are solutions for urinary incontinence. Let’s take a look at 3 strategies that can help with stress incontinence.
We know it isn’t exactly an easy conversation, but we want you to tell us about any issues you’re having with stress incontinence.
This form of incontinence is incredibly common among women for a number of reasons. For example, there are around 3.6 million births each year in the US, and many of these moms deal with stress incontinence during and after pregnancy. Or, for the 1.3 million American women who enter menopause each year, stress urinary incontinence is one of the more common side effects of the loss of hormones.
Whatever has precipitated your stress incontinence, we want to know about it so that we can work toward remedying this common issue. For our part, we offer a wide range of useful tools, such as pessaries and hormone replacement therapies, which are two effective ways to address pelvic prolapse-related incontinence.
We can also discuss some lifestyle strategies that we review below.
Stress urinary incontinence often develops due to a weakness in your pelvic floor, which is a group of muscles that hold your pelvic organs in place.
Menopause, aging, pregnancy, obesity, and more can weaken your pelvic floor, allowing your bladder to shift down and press up against other organs, which results in stress incontinence.
So, one of the most effective practices is to strengthen these muscles. In a blog post last month, we took a deeper dive into pelvic floor strengthening exercises, such as Kegels, so we invite you to revisit this post for some important information.
We recommend lifestyle changes that can help combat stress incontinence, such as:
Each of these is an important step toward regaining control over your bladder, and we’re happy to help you find the right resources for each.
The most important takeaway here is that stress incontinence is highly treatable and manageable if we work together.
For a more personalized plan for relieving your stress urinary incontinence, please contact one of our offices in McAllen or Edinburg, Texas, to schedule an appointment.
