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Interstitial Cystitis Overview
Interstitial cystitis refers to a feeling of pressure or pain in the bladder area. In conjunction with this pain for a patient, this condition is often associated with lower urinary tract symptoms that have gone on for more than six weeks. As a chronic bladder health issue, bladder pain syndrome (BPS) and interstitial cystitis (IC) are the same thing.
Symptoms of Interstitial Cystitis
Symptoms can be mild to severe depending on the individual patient. For certain patients, the symptoms may be intermittent, whereas others might experience them consistently. Although it can feel like a bladder infection, interstitial cystitis is not the same thing.
Interstitial Cystitis Pain
Patients who have IC might have bladder pain that gets increasingly worse as the bladder fills. Others might feel pain in other areas such as the lower abdomen, lower back or urethra.
Women can also feel pain in the vagina and men can feel pain in the scrotum or testicle. This sometimes begins with urinary frequency. A patient with IC or BPS has to urinate frequently throughout the day and night. As the frequency becomes more severe, it leads to urgency. A normal patient urinates no more than seven times a day.
High Risk IC Patients
Currently, there are no standard techniques in place to diagnose IC/BPS, which makes it difficult to estimate the number of people who are affected by it on a regular basis. Data have shown, however, that certain patients are more likely to develop IC than other patients. For example, the risk increases with age and it is two to three times more common in women than in men.
Causes of IC
There are many different theories linked to a potential diagnosis of IC, including:
- Something in the urine that harms the bladder
- A masked cell
- Defects in the bladder tissue
- The bladder being attacked by the body’s immune system
- Bladder sensation nerve changes
Interstitial Cystitis Complications
A number of different complications have been associated with interstitial cystitis, including emotional problems from interrupted sleep and chronic pain, sexual intimacy issues, lower quality of life, and reduced bladder capacity .
Due to the high risk of complications, any patient with this diagnosis should be prepared to talk to their doctor about next steps and a plan of treatment.
IC Types
Researchers are currently still investigating interstitial cystitis and why the symptoms can present differently in different patients. It is expected that there are additional subtypes of this condition. Two of the most commonly recognized subtypes of IC are ulcerative and non-ulcerative.
Ulcerative IC affects up to ten percent of IC patients and this typically begins with patches or ulcers on the bladder wall. Non-ulcerative IC patients present with pinpoint hemorrhages in the bladder wall. Any inflammation of the bladder can give this appearance which makes it very complicated for patients who are suffering. It is expected that approximately five percent of patients have what is known as end-stage disease in which their bladders have very low capacity and terrible pain.
