The results of a new study suggest that improved urinary continence is one of the benefits that overweight and obese women can expect to experience with weight loss.

Prior reports have indicated that obesity is a risk factor for urinary incontinence, lead author Dr Leslee L. Subak and colleagues point out, but definitive evidence that weight loss can relieve this problem was lacking.

As reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, the researchers assessed urinary outcomes in 338 overweight and obese women with 10 or more incontinence episodes per week who were randomly assigned to participate in a weight-loss program or education intervention (control group) for six months.

On average, programme participants lost eight per cent of their body weight, significantly more than the 1.6 per cent lost in the control group, Dr Subak, from the University of California, San Francisco, and co-researchers report.

By six months, the intervention group had experienced a 47 per cent drop in incontinence episodes compared with a 28 per cent reduction in the control group. Stress-incontinence but not urge-incontinence episodes declined to a greater extent in the intervention group.

Compared with control patients, significantly more intervention patients had a clinical relevant reduction of at least 70 per cent in the frequency of overall incontinence episodes, stress-incontinence episodes, and urge-incontinence episodes, the authors note.

The findings “support consideration of weight reduction as a first-line treatment for overweight and obese women with incontinence,” the researchers conclude.

Reuters Health

Source: The New England Journal of Medicine for January 29, 2009

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