Nighttime Bedwetting

Video Transcript

"My name is Dr. Randy Hyde. I want to talk to you about the physiological basis of nocturnal enuresis, or bed wetting, night time bed wetting. It's a biological factor, that is, has a physiological basis. And the physiological basis is deep sleeping. So you have a child that normally, a normal child that doesn't have bed wetting, normally, they go through four stages of sleep. The first is, they go down just a little bit into sleep, it's barely even recognizable as sleep, second a little further, third a little further, and fourth is deep sleep. And then they come back up, and then they go back down, then they go back up and back down. We all go through this circadian rhythm, or different stages of sleep. That's a normal process. For a child with enuresis, what happens is they start out, and they go down into the first stage, rush into the second, quickly through the third, and then they bottom out into a very, very deep level of sleep. It's just this side of comatose. Not really, but seriously, very deep sleep. So what happens, is the brain is getting the signal from the bladder, "hey, I've got to go, please wake up, man, wake up, I got to go, wake up, wake up! Oh, too late, again!" And the child will wet the bad. That's what happens. Is they are so deeply asleep, that the brain isn't picking up that signal."