If you’ve cursed the number of times you need to get up in the middle of the night to urinate, you might choose to stop cursing after you read the findings of a recent study that was published in the International Journal of Cancer.
During the day, we usually urinate every few hours. Some people hold on to their urine longer than others, but it’s not for as long as we may hold it at night. For people lucky enough to sleep a solid 8 hours or more, that’s how long urine stays in the bladder too. But, the urine has some nasty stuff in it, which our body is trying to eliminate. When the urine stays in the bladder for extended periods, carcinogens like tobacco, are exposed to the bladder lining for that amount of time.
The study, done in Spain, looked at 884 people who had been diagnosed with bladder cancer and compared them with 996 people who did not have cancer, called controls. What the researchers found was that people who got up at least two times during the night to urinate had a reduced risk of developing bladder cancer of between 40% to 59%. This is a significant finding.
Throughout the world, every year there are approximately 357,000 newly diagnosed cases of bladder cancer. Every year, there are 145,000 deaths caused by bladder cancer.
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Image: MorgueFile.com
Tags: cancer blog, bladder cancer