newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JANE WOODRUFF

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Botox gets a good deal of attention as a weapon against wrinkles in aging women, but the drug has many other uses besides cosmetic. It can be used to treat several health problems, including urgency urinary incontinence.

Urinary incontinence is when urine leaks involuntarily from the bladder, urgency incontinence is when there is a sudden, intense urge to go to the bathroom, reports FoxNews.com. Injections of Botox had been used to treat this type of incontinence in the past, but only after oral medication had been been tried and failed. Now, it seems, the Botox is just as effective as the oral medication, but with fewer common side effects like dry mouth or constipation.

The study was conducted by Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, and reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, and you can read about it here.

The study looked at 241 women, and the women who received the Botox showed the same reduction of daily incontinence incidents as the women who took the oral medications – about 3 percent, and 27 percent of those women experienced a complete disappearance of their symptoms. The study did show the Botox group had a higher occurrence of urinary infections than oral medication did. Still, it seems that Botox will be an effective treatment for urinary incontinence going forward.

Botox has been used to treat multiple sclerosis, migraines and now, according to a recent study, it has been shown to fight depression.