We can now distinguish Overactive Bladder Syndrome from IC!

New study came out today, a lot of technical terminology but I will link the study. Basically through various methods they are now able to distinguish if you have IC or Overactive bladder even if you don't have Hunners Lesions (like me). This is actually a huge step in the right direction!

Here is the study on PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27378135

Yes, that's too much for my brain to understand. But my first thought is this probably correlates with information in Professor James Malone-Lee's MP meeting that Jill1947 posted the other day, being:

"Urgency and incontinence alone was found to correlate with a low probability of having an infection"

And also the antibiotic study summary I posted the other day (2011: ‘Treating OAB with antibiotics’, Authors: Gill K., Khasriya R., Kupelian A., Brackenridge L., Horsley H., Sathiananthamoorthy S. & Malone-Lee J. http://www.ics.org/Abstracts/Publish/106/000112.pdf), that concluded:

"The OAB without pyuria [white blood cells] group, who received only antimuscarinics [and no antibiotics] and bladder training, recovered the fastest."

So maybe better defining the subgroups will help point to what the cause is (or isn't).

Hi Joseph,

I don't know if you've seen it yet, but some new research has come out of University of Kent about overactive bladder, potentially linking its cause to bacterial infection.

The study found some OAB patients have "low-grade inflammation which is missed by conventional NHS testing" and that " in these patients the low-grade inflammation is associated with bacteria living inside the bladder wall". I know correlation doesn't equal cause but it's pretty interesting all the same.

Here is the link to their news article:

https://www.kent.ac.uk/news/science/10441/bacterial-infection-possible-cause-of-bladder-condition

And here is the link to the article:

http://ajprenal.physiology.org/content/early/2016/06/27/ajprenal.00339.2015

Altered urothelial ATP signalling in major subset of human overactive bladder patients with pyuria
Alberto Contreras-Sanz, Louise Krska, Aswini A Balachandran, Natasha L. Curtiss, Rajvinder Khasriya, Stephen Kelley, Matthew Strutt, Hardyal S Gill, Kevin M Taylor, Kylie J Mansfield, Changhao Wu, Claire M Peppiatt-Wildman, James Malone-Lee, Jonathan Duckett, Scott S. Wildman
American Journal of Physiology - Renal Physiology Jun 2016, ajprenal.00339.2015; DOI: 10.1152/ajprenal.00339.2015