Neurogenic Bladder Causes Incontinence, Overactive, Underactive Bladder for Catheter Treatment
Neurogenic bladder is an issue with your normal bladder function caused by some sort of nervous system damage. This damage can cause your bladder to be underactive or overactive. And either way, it’ll likely result in incontinence.
Your urinary tract system contain muscles and nerves that work in concert to retain urine in your bladder and they then release it at your desired convenience. Nerves notify your brain about the status of yourbladder’s urine level and then your brain signals the bladder muscles to either tighten or let go. With neurogenic bladder, nerves that carry bladder status messages don’t work right.
An overactive neurogenic bladder is characterized by uncontrolled, frequent urine excretion. An underactive neurogenic bladder is the loss of the sensation that your bladder is full. Incontinence is marked by small amounts of urine dribbling out because of overactive’s lack of control or underactive’s overfilling.
Urinary incontinence is the most common symptom of a neurogenic bladder. A common symptom of neurogenic caused overactive bladder is frequent urination. Whereas, underactive is urine retention.
Some of a neurogenic bladder causes are:
- stroke
- brain tumor
- multiple sclerosis
- Alzheimer’s disease
- peripheral neuropathy
- Shy-Drager syndrome
- heavy metal poisoning
- spinal cord injury, tumors
- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
- diabetes ~ diabetic neuropathy
- infectious disease complication ~ syphilis, polio, AIDs, herpes
Recurring UTIs and pressure sores caused by skin breaking down because of chronic urine leakage are a couple of neurogenec bladder’s ramifications.
Use of a catheter is a common treatment method for incontinence caused by neurogenic bladder. Depending on the cause and your situation, catheterization may be self inserted intermittently at various times throughout your day. Or an indwelling catheter may used, which means a catheter is in place all the time.
However, medications may be all that’s needed to manage your overactive or underactive bladder, such as:
- oxybutynin, propantheline relaxes overactive bladder nerves
- bethanechol activates certain nerves for underactive bladder
In some cases, surgery might be needed.
Kegel exercises may be recommended to help strengthen your pelvic floor muscles in an effort to prevent neurogenic bladder’s incontinence. And antibiotics may be necessary when bladder infection recurrence is an issue.
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