Dr Orla Conlon

Yes, well, incontinence basically is meaning not being dry, not being continent.

And there's lots, there's a few different types.

Now, what I'm going to concentrate on today is urinary incontinence.

But believe it or not, a lot of women also suffer in silence.

Fecal incontinence, where that is where you actually lost control of your bowel and you would stain and soil yourself.

Or even when you pass wind, you could stain and soil yourself.

But in relation to urinary stress incontinence, that would be the most common type of incontinence that we would see.

And there's a few different types of urinary stress incontinence.

The first thing we associate with incontinence is if you cough or sneeze or laugh.

Or, for example, if you're on the dance floor, if you've had a couple of drinks, you're dancing and you've had a little leak.

And the stress incontinence basically means that the pelvic floor isn't strong enough.

And on stressing the abdominal muscles, stressing the pelvic floor, that's when the leak happens.

So it means that the neck of the bladder needs a little bit of extra support.

Now, that can be from below the

a support from the pelvic muscles, but it also can be from the pressure from above.

And the most common cause of that is pregnancy.

It's not necessarily just if you've had a traumatic birth or a vaginal birth or prolonged labour.

It's also even with women who've had cesarean sections because it's the pressure from the pregnancy that often causes the weakness.

The other issue would be, say, for example, if you have very heavy menstrual pituitary,

periods and you had like fibroids or a mass in the pelvis or a big ovarian cyst, something that's causing pressure, you know, from above can cause the leakage.