Distress Due to Urinary Problems and Psychosocial Correlates among Retired Men in Hong Kong

Marcus Yu Lung Chiu,Xue Yang,Ho Ting Wong

doi:10.3390/ijerph17072533

Abstract

Urinary problems are common among aging men, but there is a paucity of research efforts to understand the psychosocial aspects of the illness. This study aims to understand how common and distressing urinary problems are for newly retired men in Hong Kong and to test the associations between mental health, self-stigma of seeking help, fatigue, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and distress due to urinary problems. To assess this, 139 out of 200 members of a retired men’s social club (mean age 63.5) were successfully interviewed. Two-fifths of the participants felt distressed due to their urinary problems and one-third of the participants had been troubled by urinary incontinence or nocturia in the past six months. Yet the majority of the participants (55%) did not seek help from any medical profession. The group who were distressed by urinary problems showed significantly poorer mental health, reported more fatigue symptoms, were less satisfied with their sexual relationships and overall self-esteem, and were less able to stop unpleasant thoughts or to get social support than the non-distressed group. Cultural perceptions of masculinity and decreased sexual vigor might have affected participants’ willingness to seek help at an early stage. Targeted health education, mutual support groups, and sensitively designed services at the community level are suggested to address these physical and mental health issues.

Highlights

Urinary problems, commonly caused by “Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia” [1,2,3], comprise of a mixture of symptoms from three categories: storage, voiding, and post-micturition [1,4].Urinary problems are considered common among older men in Western and Asian countries [1,5]and men are more likely than women to suffer from them [4,6]
The present study investigated the proportion of urinary problems and distress due to urinary problems in the last six months and compared the levels of a range of psychosocial variables between the groups with and without distress due to urinary problems in a sample of Chinese male retirees in Hong Kong
This study aimed to bring to the surface the potential adverse impact of urinary problems on a range of psychosocial status, including mental health, coping self-efficacy, fatigue, and self-esteem in sexual relationships, so that more knowledge on the topic could be made available to helping professions and there is an opportunity for the participants to talk about this tabooed topic that might have disturbed them for some time

Summary

Introduction

Commonly caused by “Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia” [1,2,3], comprise of a mixture of symptoms from three categories: storage (symptoms such as nocturia or urinary incontinence), voiding (symptoms include reduced urinary stream or terminal dribble), and post-micturition (symptoms such as the sensation of incomplete emptying) [1,4].Urinary problems are considered common among older men in Western and Asian countries [1,5]and men are more likely than women to suffer from them [4,6]. Urinary problems are considered common among older men in Western and Asian countries [1,5]. The prevalence and the severity of urinary problems tend to increase with the age of men [1,4]. The United States reported that approximately half of the men in a community sample aged ≥40 experienced urinary incontinence in the past month (sample size n = 14,140) [5]. Hong Kong studies [7,8] revealed findings comparable to Western and other Asian countries. In Wong, Woo, Hong, Leung, Kwok, and Leung’s [7] study, 1739 older Chinese men (above age 65) were openly recruited from the community and assessed on “Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms” (LUTS) using the

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