Incontinence Linked to Depression in Women

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Women with urinary incontinence have close to double the risk of major depression as women without incontinence, results of a new study indicate.

Drs. Donna E. Stewart and Simone E. Vigod of the University of Toronto evaluated data from the Canadian Community Health Survey, which included 69,000 women, 18 years of age or older, who were not pregnant.

Overall, just over 3 percent of the women had urinary incontinence, and most of the affected women (80 percent) were over age 44 years. The prevalence of major depression in the preceding years was 9.4 percent.

The researchers found that 15.5 percent of women with urinary incontinence had major depression, compared with 9.2 percent of women without urinary incontinence, the researchers report in the medical journal Psychosomatics.

Women with urinary incontinence and depression tended to be younger and slightly heavier than those without depression. Women with both conditions were also less likely to be married and more likely to have middle or high incomes.

Among women with urinary incontinence, those with depression consulted physicians three times as often as women without depression, and they had higher levels of self-reported distress and reported more work absences.

"Regardless of how the two disorders are related, the combined impact of urinary incontinence and major depression exceeds the impact of either condition alone," the investigators conclude.

"It is imperative that women with either condition be screened for the other," they conclude. "Leaving either of these conditions undiagnosed and thus untreated will clearly have significant impact on the health and quality of life of individual patients and the population as a whole."

SOURCE: Psychosomatics, March-April 2006.