Joseph G. Ouslander, MD Professor of Medicine Director, Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology Chief of Medicine Wesley Woods Center on Aging at Emory University Atlanta, Georgia

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		The complex symptoms of overactive bladder and the distinction between what we call overactive bladder and what is normally called urge incontinence.

Jump to bottom of the page Clinically I think that patients with an overactive bladder often have urge incontinence and that's a common problem in older people. Up to 30% of community-dwelling older people will have the symptom of urge incontinence. Close to 10% will have bothersome incontinence that they have to wear a pad or alter their lifestyle in some way that's happening more than once a week. However, a lot of those people, as well as an additional percentage of people, are bothered by other symptoms. These include urinary frequency, urinary urgency, nocturia, that are bothersome in their everyday life and interfere with their activities. But they wouldn't consider themselves incontinent, but they're very bothered. They probably have an overactive bladder in their everyday life but either they are physiologically able to compensate for it by squeezing their sphincter and essentially do what we teach them in behavioral therapy, or they modify their lifestyle so that they're around a toilet all the time and they prophylactically urinate to avoid getting this strong sense of urgency and actually leaking. So I think the symptom complex of an overactive bladder is more than just the symptom of urge incontinence and leakage.

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