Female UrologyNational Community Prevalence of Overactive Bladder in the United States Stratified by Sex and Age
Section snippets
Material and Methods
EpiLUTS, a population-based, cross-sectional survey, was conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden to evaluate the prevalence and symptom-specific bother of OAB and other LUTS and to evaluate the impact of these symptoms on health-related quality of life, work productivity, mental health, and sexual health.7 In the United States, 20,000 men and women aged ≥40 years were recruited from Internet-based panels developed from consumer and voter databases. The rationale for this
Results
Among approximately 1.5 million Internet panel members, 62,301 (approximately 4%) residing in the United States were randomly selected to receive e-mail invitations, from whom 36,821 responses were received (59.6% response rate after weighting for error, including inaccurate or inactive e-mail addresses for potential respondents). Among these responses, 31,588 surveys (85.8%) were eligible for analysis. Because there was an overabundance of younger respondents in the eligible surveys relative
Comment
The EpiLUTS study surveyed 20,000 US adults aged ≥40 years and to our knowledge it is the largest population-representative survey conducted in a single country. The size of the survey population should strengthen the accuracy of the prevalence figures obtained. In EpiLUTS, the prevalence of OAB symptoms defined as at least “sometimes” was 27.2% for men and 43.1% for women. As expected, prevalence was lower when OAB symptoms were categorized by the more restrictive definition of at least
Conclusions
Although OAB symptom prevalence with the more restricted definition of at least “often” was similar to that reported for men in previous epidemiologic studies, a much higher prevalence of OAB symptoms was found for women in the Internet-based EpiLUTS survey. When the broader OAB definition of at least “sometimes” was used, many more men and women in the EpiLUTS survey reported OAB symptoms and were bothered by them than expected based on findings from previous surveys, including the NOBLE4 and
Acknowledgments
Editorial support was provided by Colin Mitchell and Karen Zimmermann from Complete Healthcare Communications, Inc., and was funded by Pfizer, Inc.
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This study was funded by Pfizer, Inc.