In overweight, pre-diabetic women, intensive lifestyle intervention to prevent diabetes also results in a lower risk of urinary incontinence, a new study shows.

“Less-frequent urinary incontinence may be a powerful motivator for women to choose lifestyle modification to prevent diabetes, ” Dr. Jeanette S. Brown and colleagues point out.

Type 2 diabetes increases the risk of urinary incontinence for women by 50 to 70 percent, the team from the Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group at George Washington University in Rockville, Maryland, explains in the medical journal Diabetes Care.

While weight loss is known to reduce incontinence, the researchers add, there is some evidence that exercise can increase it.

Brown’s group investigated the effects of diet and exercise, compared to drug treatment with metformin only or inactive “placebo” treatment, on incontinence risk among 1957 overweight women at high risk for diabetes.

During the trial, which lasted about 3 years, women in the intensive lifestyle group lost an average of 3.4 kilograms, compared with 1.5 kg for those on metformin and a gain of 0.5 kg in the placebo group.

The percentage who developed diabetes in the three groups was 14.9 percent, 23.9 percent, and 30.9 percent, respectively.

At the close of the study, 38.3 percent of the women in the lifestyle intervention group had incontinence, compared to 48.1 percent of women on metformin and 45.7 percent of those on placebo.

Most of the difference in rates of incontinence was attributable to weight loss, the researchers conclude. They recommend that health care providers get out the message that “weight loss and lifestyle intervention may lower the risk of urinary incontinence.”

SOURCE: Diabetes Care, February 2006.