Is bladder leaking common?

If bladder leaking is common, why don’t we talk about it? You can tell it’s common when looking at the aisle full of incontinence pads in the grocery store.  And you can tell by the medication ads on TV.  You can tell by all the different products out there.  Even with all this evidence, it doesn’t really feel that common to most women.  And that is because we don’t like to talk about it.  But really, what are we talking about here?  How common is it?

You’ll see lots of different estimates on the number of women with bladder leaking out there.  It all depends on who you ask and how you ask the question….

If you ask older women, sicker women, or women who live in assisted living, the estimates are higher.  If you include younger women, the estimates are lower.  The estimates are really high if you ask women if they have ever leaked.  If you look at women who are so bothered with bladder leaking that they saw a provider, the estimates are lower.  So like many things, the devil is in the details.

I think some of the best data comes from the NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey).

This is a survey conducted by the US Government (since the 1960s).  It is designed to assess adults’ and children’s health and nutritional status in the US.  About 5,000 Americans participate each year.  All the participants live out in the community.  They ask all kinds of questions, and some focus on bladder leaking.

When researchers looked at this survey data from 2015 to 201, they found that 62% of women had some degree of urinary incontinence.  21% of all women had moderate to severe urinary incontinence.  This means that more than 28 million American women have pretty bothersome bladder leaking.  This number is just staggering to me.  They also looked at risk factors for leaking and found (not really surprising) that increasing age, weight, vaginal delivery, and being white increase the risk of leaking.  Close to 40% of the women had stress urinary incontinence (leaking with exercise and laughing), around 22% had urgency urinary incontinence (going all the time, needing to run to the bathroom), and about 30% had mixed urinary incontinence (both stress and urgency incontinence).

So the bottom line is  Leaking Is Common.  You aren’t alone.  You should not hesitate to talk to your provider about your leaking.  Chances are, they talk about this issue frequently.

Patel UJ et al. Female Pelvic Med Reconstr Surg 2022