Healthcare

Several studies has suggested that drinking coffee can causes or worsening the urinary incontinence or bladder leakage or overactive bladder, despite the results itself may have inconsistent, including current international guidelines that suggested negative effects of caffeine intake for this area.

However, from the study of 14,000 Swedish female twins for caffeine-consumption habits and urinary incontinence symptoms, the researchers found contrary results as current recommendation.

As many doctors sometimes tell the women to reduce caffeine intake due to their urinary incontinence, in fact recent findings suggested that coffee intake reduce the risk of urinary incontinence.

According to the findings, initially, coffee drinkers showed little high percentage of urinary incontinence compared to non-coffee drinkers (9% vs 6%, respectively).

However, after adjusting contributing factors (age, body mass index, smoking, and had given birth or not), the risk of urinary incontinence decreased around 22% among coffee drinkers.

The authors noted that coffee drinkers tended to be older and their age explained most of the original higher rate of incontinence.

Similar effect also showed with tea drinking, where at initial there is a link to overactive bladder, but disappear after compared members of both identical and fraternal twin pairs.

Although this finding showed no increase risk of urinary incontinence or bladder leakage from coffee or tea intake, however, the study authors, Giorgio Tettamanti, a doctoral student in epidemiology at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, suggested to drinks moderately of tea and coffee as it has a consequent to make the bladder full of fluid.

However, he stressed out that fluid restriction may cause troublesome constipation among elderly patients, and elderly subjects are more likely to experience urinary incontinence.