Surgery to remove tonsils most likely will not help children with bed wetting, according to a recent study.
As unlikely as it would seem, many doctors have said the surgery, when used to help kids who have trouble with breathing at night, will also stop them from wetting the bed.
But researchers have found that although many kids who had their tonsils removed had also stopped wetting the bed within six months, so had kids who underwent unrelated surgeries, such as hernia repair.
“We don’t recommend tonsillectomy as a treatment for bedwetting,” study author Dr. Carmin Kalorin, a urologist at Capital Urological Associates in North Carolina, told Reuters Health.
About 15 percent of five-year-olds wet the bed at night. There may be a number of reasons why, such as small bladders, increased urine production at night, or trouble waking up when it’s time to go, explained Kalorin. For some kids, “the signal from their bladder to their brain is not enough to arouse them.”
Bedwetting may also stem from trouble breathing at night, which triggers the release of hormones that increase urine production, some studies suggest.
In children, one of the most common reasons for nighttime breathing problems is enlarged tonsils. As a result, researchers have looked into whether removing tonsils, a procedure that costs several thousand dollars, helps them stop wetting the bed at night.
Compared with previous studies that suggested the surgery was helpful, Kalorin said the new work was more rigorous and thorough.
The study called on 326 children and their parents to complete a questionnaire about bedwetting and incontinence. Most of the children involved were already scheduled to undergo tonsillectomy for nighttime breathing trouble, and the rest went through unrelated surgeries.
The researchers included children with unrelated surgeries to show that just having surgery, regardless of type, would not influence bedwetting.
About 33 percent of the children started out as bedwetters. After six months, about 50 percent of those kids could go through the night without an incidence, no matter what type of surgery they had.
The findings of the study suggests that bedwetting may disappear by itself, said Dr Richard Rosenfeld of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.
“If your reason for doing the surgery is bedwetting, maybe give them six months, and see if they’ve improved,” he told Reuters. Still, he added, the study does not rule out that tonsillectomy may improve bedwetting in some children with severe sleep disorders.
Instead of tonsillectomy for bedwetting, parents might want to try medications that let the bladder fill more or decrease the amount of urine produced at night. But, these medications come with side effects, cautioned Kalorin.
Bedwetting alarms let kids, and their parents, know when they’ve had an accident and help kids become more aware and wake up more easily. Ultimately, Kalorin said, “most of them just outgrow it.”
The study is published in the Journal of Urology.
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