Urinary Incontinence: Its Assessment and Relationship to Depression among Community-Dwelling Multiethnic Older Women

Abstract

Urinary Incontinence (UI) affects many older adults. Some of its deleterious consequences include stress, major depression, diminished quality of life, sexual dysfunction, and familial discord. Of the various mental health problems identified in the literature as being comorbid with UI, the most notable one continues to be depression. Despite a wealth of research contributions on this topic, the available literature is underrepresentative of ethnic minority older women. Culture has been shown to have a significant impact on a woman's perception of her own UI symptoms; this demonstrates the necessity for the recruitment of ethnically and culturally diverse samples when studying UI. In the present study, we determined the prevalence of UI among 140 community-dwelling, ethnically diverse older women (28.2%), discovered that our new UI screener is reliable, and did not find the UI-depression link to be significant. The clinical and research implications of our findings are discussed.

Comparing the Prevalence of Depression in Postmenopausal Women With and Without Urinary Incontinence

“…Hung et al [12] in a longitudinal study with a larger sample size using COX Regression analysis, showed that urinary incontinence can predict depression in postmenopausal women. Our results are hence consistent with the results of Bradley et al and Hung et al The reason for discrepancy between our results and those of Lagana et al [6] may be dueto the difference in the assessment tool; we used the BDI-II tool, while they used CES-D scale which reported no overall score of depression (only in dimensions).…”

“…The results of this study showed that depression in postmenopausal women with urinary incontinence was higher in terms of severity and rate compared tocontrols. Bradley et al [19] and Lagana et al [6] conducted Figure 1. Box Plot of depression frequency in two study groups studies similar to our study using the comparative crosssectional design to examine the difference in depression level of women with and without urinary incontinence where the significant difference was reported only in Bradley et al's study.…”

“…All of these types, especially mixed type, affect the quality of life [5]. In some studies, a significant association between depression and urinary incontinence has been reported [2,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…Duloxetine is a serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor that has therapeutic role in these three disorders [17]. However, some studies have found no association between depression and urinary incontinence [6,18,19].…”

Association between Female Urinary Incontinence and Geriatric Health Problems: Results from Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2006)

“…One study of UI and depression showed no association between the two in multiethnic older women. 17) However, another study indicated a threefold increase in depression in a group younger than 45 years compared to a group older than 45 years. 18) In our study, cerebrovascular disease was identified as a significant factor associated with UI.…”