Drinking tea and coffee didn’t too much increase the risk of urinary incontinence, in fact somewhat decrease the risk

Several studies has suggested that drinking coffee can causes or worsening the urinary incontinence or bladder leakage or overactive bladder, despite the results itself may have inconsistent, including current international guidelines that suggested negative effects of caffeine intake for this area.

However, from the study of 14,000 Swedish female twins for caffeine-consumption habits and urinary incontinence symptoms, the researchers found contrary results as current recommendation.

As many doctors sometimes tell the women to reduce caffeine intake due to their urinary incontinence, in fact recent findings suggested that coffee intake reduce the risk of urinary incontinence.

According to the findings, initially, coffee drinkers showed little high percentage of urinary incontinence compared to non-coffee drinkers (9% vs 6%, respectively).

However, after adjusting contributing factors (age, body mass index, smoking, and had given birth or not), the risk of urinary incontinence decreased around 22% among coffee drinkers.

The authors noted that coffee drinkers tended to be older and their age explained most of the original higher rate of incontinence.

Causes of temporary urinary incontinence

Examples are:

Drinking too much tea, coffee or carbonated drinks. These can irritate the bladder and cause or contribute to incontinence. Coffee and other drinks contain caffeine which is a diuretic, i.e. it increases the urge to pass urine.
Excessive alcohol. Alcohol, like caffeine, is also a diuretic.
Certain medications like diuretic pills, heart medications, cold medications and antidepressants can cause or contribute to incontinence.
Urinary Tract Infection is a fairly common condition. The infection may cause sufficient irritation to the bladder to cause incontinence.
Constipation may result in stool impaction in the rectum. This can cause irritation to the nerves to the bladder, contributing to incontinence.

Similar effect also showed with tea drinking, where at initial there is a link to overactive bladder, but disappear after compared members of both identical and fraternal twin pairs.

Although this finding showed no increase risk of urinary incontinence or bladder leakage from coffee or tea intake, however, the study authors, Giorgio Tettamanti, a doctoral student in epidemiology at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, suggested to drinks moderately of tea and coffee as it has a consequent to make the bladder full of fluid.

The main symptom of urinary incontinence is leakage of urine. This leakage may be frequent and heavy, or it may be little and rather rare.