When a friend invites you to an event, you do some quick calculations: How long is the event, are there bathrooms, and will they be available on demand?
If you’re sick of always having to plan everything around your overactive bladder (OAB), you’re certainly not alone. This condition is fairly common in the United States and affects men and women almost equally — 16% to 16.9%, respectively.
For many years now, the team at Arizona Urology has helped scores of patients break free from urinary incontinence issues due to OAB with the innovative InterStim™ system by Medtronics.
If you want to learn more, read on to find out how InterStim works to control an overactive bladder.
To understand why InterStim is so successful at helping people manage their OAB, let’s step back and review what’s at the heart of this condition.
Your urinary tract is in your pelvis, but it functions by communicating with your brain. Your kidneys filter your blood, creating about 1 to 2 quarts of urine daily during that process.
Urine passes from your kidneys into tubes called ureters, which deliver the fluid to your bladder. As your bladder fills, it communicates with your brain, and when the organ is full, your brain signals you to empty it.
With OAB, the signaling malfunctions, and you feel the need to pee far more frequently and urgently, often without warning, which can lead to incontinence. This occurs even when your bladder isn’t full.
InterStim, which has been around for over 25 years, approaches OAB through neuromodulation. What this means is that we disrupt the messaging between your brain and your urinary tract.
To tackle OAB through neuromodulation, we place leads near your sacral nerve, which is the nerve that communicates between your brain and your bladder. These leads deliver mild stimulation that disrupts the overactive messaging to reduce that “gotta go right now” feeling.
One of the aspects that we appreciate with InterStim is that we can perform a trial run for a week to see if the treatment works. During this trial period, we insert leads powered by an external battery pack that you wear as a belt. You record your results through a special Medtronics app, and then we review them together.
If the Interstim test run works well in controlling your bladder, we can take the next step and implant a small (slightly larger than a quarter) battery pack just underneath your skin for longer-term protection against OAB.
If you’d like to explore whether InterStim is your potential ticket to freedom from an overactive bladder, we invite you to schedule an appointment at one of our offices in Phoenix, Goodyear, Gilbert, and Glendale, Arizona.
