Bedwetting is a common medical condition and one that neither parent nor child should feel embarrassed about.
Sadly, due to a lack of awareness on the condition, many sufferers and their families can be left feeling ashamed and unwilling to seek help. It can therefore have a serious impact on your growing child’s self confidence and day-to-day performance.
To help highlight the condition among the public and healthcare professions alike, the International Children’s Continence Society and the European Society for Paediatric Urology have launched World Bedwetting Day on Saturday, 17th October 2015.
Their Time to Take Action slogan is to show that much more can be done to treat children suffering from bedwetting.
In essence, the aim of World Bedwetting Day is to encourage families to talk about the issue and seek the help they need.
1. Who can be affected?
Approximately 5-10% of seven-year-olds regularly wet their bed, with the problem sometimes persisting into the teenage years, and even adulthood.
2. What causes it?
For most kids, bedwetting is caused by the over-production of urine at night with an inability to wake up being another reason. It may also be inherited, and in approximately 70% of cases there is at least one family member who has or had the same problem as a child. If the mother was a bedwetter, then her child is seven times more likely to suffer from enuresis.
3. Why you need to see your doctor:
For the most part, children who wet the bed don’t have any underlying disease but it is important to rule out an over-active bladder, faecal incontinence and constipation or recurrent urinary tract infections.
Bedwetting may not go away on its own but there is help out there for those who need it.
