BOTOX® For Overactive Bladder
1)An overactive bladder is a symptom of frequency and urgency, and sometimes it's associated with incontinence, which is a fancy term for urinary leakage. It affects men and women almost equally, and one of the things we want to make sure it isn't is an infection or cancers or things like that. But typically it is a benign disease process.
2) BOTOX itself is derived from the botulinum bacterium. Some have associated it with perishable canned food that explodes, but it's derived from that, and what it does is it goes into the bladder, or any ... whether it's some muscle, and it prevents nerve endings from releasing certain chemicals, and that prevents the muscle from contracting. So, similar for wrinkles that people inject into the face, the same thing can be done in the bladder.
3)BOTOX is administered in a minimally-invasive fashion. We do it with a small camera, where I place a needle through the camera and then the needle itself goes into the bladder muscle lining, and we inject the medication that way. We do that in the operating room or in our procedure room here. Takes about 15 to 20 minutes, and the durability of the treatment lasts about six to nine months, and it does have to be repeated as the BOTOX wears off.
Is BOTOX For You?
4)BOTOX is a good solution for refractory overactive bladder, where you fail medications and behavior modification. The only downside I think is that you do have to have repeated procedures, like I said, every six to nine months, before, but people do have good results with it.
5) Overactive bladder's treated in a stepwise fashion. First we start with typically behavior modification, which is monitoring your fluid intake, decreasing caffeinated beverages or things that can irritate the bladder. If that doesn't work, then we start with medications, and if the medications don't work, then that's when BOTOX enters the realm of treatment.
6)Some of the side effects with BOTOX injections into the bladder are infection, a little bit of blood in the urine right afterwards, and the main one we are concerned about is your bladder maintaining too much urine within it, which is called urinary retention, and that happens less than 10% of the time. Prior to signing up to have BOTOX, you must be willing, if that were to happen, this rare complication, be willing to perform catheterization on yourself as one of the criteria before proceeding with the procedure.
