When we refer to something as a quality-of-life health issue, we mean a condition that both creates discomfort and disrupts your daily life. This perfectly describes overactive bladder (OAB), which affects 33 million Americans, including up to 30% of men.
For those included in this large number, board-certified urologist Dr. Robert J. Cornell wants to review a few of our more cutting-edge treatments for OAB to help men take back control of their lives.
Under normal circumstances, when your bladder gets to about half-full, communication between your brain and your bladder tells you that you need to urinate. At this point, your sphincter is in the “off” position, and your bladder muscles are tense. As soon as you pee, your sphincter opens, and your bladder muscles relax to allow the flow of urine.
With OAB, there’s a mix-up in this nerve-signaling system that causes you to feel like you have to urinate far more frequently and urgently. And these urges and coinciding bladder responses can be strong enough that you leak urine, creating incontinence.
With men, OAB can stem from several conditions, including:
OAB can also be fleeting, such as when you drink caffeine or alcohol, which stimulates your bladder.
We can treat OAB in several different ways. But in this post, we’re confining our discussion to more advanced treatments, which are great for men who don’t respond to more conservative measures like bladder training and medications.
These innovative OAB treatment options go straight to the source of the problem — faulty nerve activity and communication — and include:
A few nerve groups influence your bladder activity, including the S3 and S4 sacral nerves, which oversee your pelvic floor, bladder sphincter, and colon.
If your OAB isn’t responding to other treatments, we can look at sacral nerve stimulation, a neuromodulation technique in which we implant a small device that emits electrical signals to help better control your urinary function.
With this approach, you come to see us for in-office treatments in which we place a small needle near the tibial nerve in your ankle that emits electrical impulses. These impulses travel up to your sacral complex, where they can better regulate bladder function.
In many cases, patients benefit from a series of weekly percutaneous tibial nerve stimulation treatments over the course of 12 weeks, with follow-up maintenance sessions as needed.
Another approach to OAB is to quiet the muscles that are contracting around your bladder with botulinum toxin (think Botox®) injections. These injections block the nerve signals that can trigger incontinence.
And the best part? You only need to come in twice a year for botulinum toxin injections.
As you can see, you’re not without options for tough OAB, and we’re happy to sit down with you to figure out which of these cutting-edge treatments might work best.
To get that ball rolling, we invite you to contact our Houston office today to schedule a consultation.
