Urinary Incontinence (UI) is a relatively common condition among older adults, and the suspicion is that it is not all that uncommon among middle-aged adults. Fortunately, behavioral, pharmacological, and surgical treatments are available for curing or managing a condition that, if left untreated, can be very costly in psychological, social, and economic terms. In order to appropriately deploy and target resources and medical care, the prevalence of and risk factors for UI must be known. Current understanding of the epidemiology of UI suffers from several gaps and uncertainties in the existing knowledge base that will be investigated in this project. They include (a) national estimates of UI for the U.S. are not known; (b) prevalence and incidence among middle-aged adults are not known; (c) the functioning of urinary symptoms and mobility limitations as risk factors of UI are not well understood; (d) aspects of survey methodology may bias the estimates in unexpected ways. An economical yet high quality way of surveying a representative sample of 1800 middle-aged and older American women and men on these issues is proposed by adding a """"""""rider"""""""" to the well-known Survey of Consumer Attitudes (SCA). 150 middle- aged and older adults will be interviewed by telephone for 12 continuous months as part of the SCA on UI, its types and severity, on urinary tract symptoms and mobility limitation. Also, six months after the initial interview respondents will be reinterviewed with the same questions to measure incidence and change. A small question wording experiment will be built into the survey according to which one-sixth of all survey respondents are presented with a different question format for measuring Ul.
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