Search Here

Getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom could be making you less productive at work, according to new research.

Researchers presenting at the European Association of Urology congress in Milan found that nocturia, where a person wakes up once or more in the night to urinate, leads to "notable work productivity loss".

Researchers studied 261 women and 385 men with nocturia and asked them fill out a standardized work productivity and activity impairment survey, which examined the effect of health problems on a person's ability to work and perform regular activities.

They found that going the bathroom at night reduced work productivity by an overwhelming 24 percent, which is greater than the productivity loss shown by people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Researchers found the condition also reduced the ability to carry out leisure activities by 34 percent.

"Nocturia is a common problem affecting around a third of adults, but its burden is underestimated and it is often dismissed as being less serious than other chronic conditions in terms of impact on quality of life and societal costs," Philip Van Kerrebroeck, professor of urology at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, said at the conference, according to The Telegraph.

"These data show that nocturia negatively affects both sleep and daytime performance and its impact on work productivity is in line with many other chronic conditions," he said.

Patients with nocturia should seek specific treatment for this debilitating condition," Van Kerrebroeck added.

While nocturia is often trivialized and dismissed as an inevitable part of the aging process, the latest findings suggest that the condition is hugely underestimated with far reaching implications.