Bladder problems seen more often among smokers than non-smokers may be further motivation for women to quit smoking, a new study suggests. Looking at 2,000 Finnish women ages 18 to 79, researchers found that smokers were three times as likely to say they frequently had to urinate - with fewer than two hours between trips to the bathroom.
They were also almost three times as likely to report "urgency." That means frequently feeling that you need to get to a bathroom quickly - a problem often diagnosed as overactive bladder.
There was no clear link between smoking and the risk of having so-called urge incontinence, in which actual leakage follows a sudden, strong urge to urinate.
But that may be because too few women in the study had urge incontinence to be able to detect a connection to smoking, according to senior researcher Dr Kari A. O. Tikkinen, of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. The findings, reported in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, do not prove that smoking, itself, causes bladder problems.
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