Overactive bladder from the patient’s perspective

Overview

Aim:
Significant increase of interest in overactive bladder (OAB) in recent years has not been accompanied accordingly by an increased awareness among the general population. This was a reason for our survey about the important aspects of overactive bladder among normal population.

Patients and methods:
A questionnaire was set up to evaluate patient’s perspective of OAB. Questionnaires were distributed among specialists from out-patient and in-patient departments in the Czech Republic (83 urologists and 17 urogynecologists) selected from the database of the Czech Urological Society. These were then statistically evaluated.

Results:
Completely filled out questionnaires were obtained from 329 patients. In the group of patients 77 % were females and 23 % males and the incidence of OAB increased gradually from the fourth to the seventh decade of age. Patients fear incontinence the most, even more than cancer, surgical procedure and loss of job.

Patients have high expectations for pharmacological treatment of OAB, 95 % of them expect more than 50% improvement of symptoms but these expectations are fulfilled in only 31 % of patients.

The most important side effect of the pharmacological treatment of OAB is dry mouth (24 % of patients) and need to administer drugs more than once a day (13 % of patients). The majority of patients (90 %) have sufficiency of information about OAB but 91 % of patients prefer to obtain it from a specialist and not from multimedia.

Conclusions:
There are lot of different points of view on many aspects of OAB between medical professionals and general population. Therefore it is very important to acquire more data about this topic and to bring the different points of view together by means of better education and communication.

Key words:
overactive bladder, patients, quality-of-life.