Accidental Bowel Leakage? You Can Control That

What if you can’t control your bowels? It happens to many women, some once in a rare while, others daily.

If you find your bowels going rogue, you probably keep it a secret. The shame may stop you from sharing your struggles; the odor alone might keep you home just in case.

If you have “accidents” often, you probably have accidental bowel leakage. With the right guidance, you can control it. Speak up and let doctors help you.

Bowel Leakage Basics

If you have accidental bowel leakage, you can’t control your bowels at least sometimes. In other words, stool — liquid or solid, or gas or mucus — might make its way out on its own accord. You’ll soil yourself instead of waiting until you’re sitting on a toilet.

Accidental bowel leakage is a type of pelvic floor dysfunction, a term that also refers to struggling to control the flow of urine. This messier version goes by many names:

• Accidental bowel leakage
• Fecal incontinence
• Anal incontinence
• Encopresis
• Stool leakage

Accidental bowel leakage can affect men and women, and there are two main types. If you have urge incontinence, you’ll know you have to run to the bathroom and simply can’t get there in time. By contrast, you won’t feel any urge if you have passive incontinence; you might not feel a thing until you realize you need to change clothes.

You’re not alone in this. Ten percent of people deal with this issue at some point. Women confront the issue more often than men do, especially women who have given birth vaginally. Those in their golden years are also prime candidates.

Causes of Accidental Bowel Leakage

If you can’t hold in your bowel movements, it can be for a wide variety of reasons. Having these issues doesn’t mean you have bowel incontinence. If you do, though, knowing the cause you may be able to find a cure.

Some causes are:

• Vaginal delivery of babies
• Multiple sclerosis
• Irritable bowel syndrome
• Diabetes
• Rectal prolapse
• Parkinson’s Disease
• Central or automatic nervous system issues
• Irritable bowel syndrome
• Chronic diarrhea
• Inflammatory bowel disease
• Thyroid disease
• Tumors near the anus, rectum or colon

How To Control Bowel Issues

Now for the good news. You don’t need to live this way. Over the past decade, doctors have developed many FDA-approved treatment options for bowel incontinence. Ask your primary care physician or OB-GYN for a referral to a urogynecologist or pelvic floor specialist. Together with specially trained physical therapists, these specialists will find a solution for you, including:

• A new routine that has you scheduling your bowel movements strategically, together with logging a history of what you eat and drink.
• Dietary changes such as taking fiber supplements, laxatives or diarrheal agents might make a difference. Sometimes having looser or bulkier stools will be helpful.
• Kegel exercises, done regularly and correctly, can strengthen all your pelvic floor muscles, including your control.
• Physical therapy with a professional who specializes in pelvic floor issues will teach you new behaviors. You’ll learn several exercises to strengthen your pelvic floor.
• Nerve stimulators have long been used to retrain people to control their urine flow. Now you can work with a physical therapist to use a nerve stimulator to control your feces flow. This is related to biofeedback.
• Sacral nerve stimulators involve a small implant that, using electrical impulses, can help you strengthen the muscles that control both feces and urine. It’s a minimally invasive outpatient procedure, and it’s so effective that few other surgical options for bowel incontinence are used anymore.
• Sphincteroplasty is a surgery that repairs the circle of muscles around the anus, known as the anal sphincter. Sometimes the surgeon will also inject silicone matter into the sphincter to strengthen it more.

If you’re not in control of your bowel movements, see a urogynecologist or pelvic floor specialist. The doctor will run diagnostic tests and will lead you to a dietary, therapeutic or surgical solution. You can fix this.