Neurogenic vs overflow incontinence

There are various reasons why incontinence can occur in the body. Two of the more common forms of incontinence are neurogenic and overflow. In an interview with dvm360 on her lecture, “UrINe or UrOUT–Common Cases Involving Micturition Management,” Natalie Marks, DVM, CVJ, CCFP, Elite FFCP-V, differentiates between neurogenic incontinence and overflow incontinence. She explains that neurogenic incontinence is linked to abnormalities in the nervous system, whereas overflow incontinence tends to be caused by metabolic or endocrine diseases.

Below is the interview transcript:

Natalie Marks, DVM, CVJ, CCFP, Elite FFCP-V: So incontinence in the body, there are many different buckets of why that happens, but 2 of the more common forms that we talk about are neurogenic and overflow. Neurogenic, if you think about the name, it sort of infers the cause there, right? It's that something abnormal has happened within the nervous system that is not allowing the bladders, lower urinary sphincter to stay close. And sometimes we think about that with lumbar disease, so intervertebral disc disease, if there's been trauma, if there's neoplasia, if there's been some type of emboli or some other degenerative condition that's caused trauma to the spine, which, of course, those nerves help control the bladder incontinence.

On the flip side, though, overflow incontinence is actually more often a metabolic or endocrine focused disease. In other words, the body is producing too much urine and just sort of like a sink where the drain is clogged, but water keeps coming in, eventually it overflows. So, we don't typically think about trauma in these cases. We're thinking again more about diseases that create more of a polyuric condition. So a PU/PD patient or one that is going to excessively produce urine, which overflows the actual kind of containment within the bladder itself.