If You Have OAB with Urge Incontinence Your Urinary Microbiome May Be Off
- Women with OAB and urge incontinence seem to have a distinctly different number and type of bacteria naturally living in their bladder
- Both men and women are not found to have actually ‘sterile’ urine
- Many of the bacteria that exist in a man’s or woman’s urine are actually not tested for with traditional cultures, it takes highly sophisticated laboratories to determine certain rarer organisms; thus some of these differences are first being found
- Over 465 distinct species of bacteria were identified in one recent study of the urinary microbiome
- When your health care provider says you didn’t show infection on a urine test for UTI, they don’t mean that you were not found to have any bugs as urine contains low numbers of bacteria at all times
- Women with a healthy urine microbiome have greater numbers of lactobacilli and they have less of the lactobacilli gasseri and more lactobacilli crispatus
- Women with OAB have been found to have 9 types of bacteria living in low numbers in their bladder including: streptociccus, staphylococcus, Gardnerella, actinomyces.
