Bladder Health

Have you ever wondered whether your bladder is as healthy as it could be? Lower urinary tract symptoms, or LUTS, are bladder problems that become more common as we age. Someone with LUTS might have to rush to the bathroom when she has the urge to urinate, experience urine leakage, have trouble emptying her bladder, or even have pain when she urinates. Most of us don’t think about bladder health until it becomes a problem.

Some common bladder health problems include:

• Urine leakage or incontinence
• Needing to urinate (pee) often during the day
• Needing to urinate (pee) often during the night
• Pain with urination (peeing)
• Feeling like your bladder doesn’t empty completely
• Bladder infection / urinary tract infection / UTI

Scientists know that there are ways to keep the bladder healthy and prevent common bladder symptoms, but we don’t know how to get that information to women before bladder problems develop.

About this study: SHOW and TELL (Survey of the Health of Wisconsin and Tracing Engagement with LUTS Learning)

The Prevention of Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms in Women (PLUS) consortium is a research team funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The mission of the PLUS consortium is to prevent lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) and empower women and girls to live active, healthy lives. One goal of the PLUS team is to inform women and girls about how to improve bladder health. This study, titled SHOW and TELL, aims to help the PLUS team learn what women and girls think about their bladder health (if they think about bladder health at all!)

This research is led by Dr. Heidi Brown at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and is funded by a sub-award from the National Institutes of Health. Our goal is to learn whether, why, and how women are interested in getting information about bladder health. To do so, we are partnering with the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin (SHOW) to give women a packet of bladder health information. Two weeks later, women will be invited to answer a short survey about whether they looked at the packet and what they thought of it. Afterwards, some women may choose to participate in phone interviews to provide us with more detailed explanations. We will compare women who looked at the packet with women who did not to see how they are different. We hope this project will ultimately help us improve the bladder health of girls and women by helping us understand the best way to reach all girls and women with bladder health information.