Drugs, Alarms, Wires, And Human Nature

A drug company in France makes a synthetic hormone for bedwetters, which it calls DDAVP. The company also makes a lot of money, because DDAVP costs around $1,200 per year. For the three in ten bedwetters who do "respond" to DDAVP, fluids are artificially kept back from the bladder for about eight hours. In most cases, this is not a health risk. But bedwetters can never learn to recognize bladder contractions during sleep if they are artificially delayed until breakfast. So DDAVP doesn't cure bedwetting at all! When DDAVP use is stopped, the bedwetting is just as bad as ever.

Some "experts" recommend that the bedwetter set an alarm clock, so as to wake up and visit the bathroom in the middle of the night. And in some cases, this can prevent bedwetting episodes - if the clock happens to go off before the bladder contractions start. But many kids wet two or three times a night! So deciding what time to set the alarm for becomes a guessing game. Worse yet, the bedwetter can never learn to recognize the bladder contractions while asleep if he or she is awoken before they happen.

Some researchers saw the importance of this recognition early on, so they ran wires from a moisture sensor up to an electric alarm. This helped bedwetters recognize bladder contractions by waking them as soon as the contractions started. The success of this idea proved for the first time that bedwetters could actually be taught in their sleep not to wet the bed!

But human nature being what it is, routing those wires between the sensors and the alarm takes really involved parents - and a really motivated bedwetter. Usually sensor holders have to be sewn into underwear, alarm holders have to be sewn onto pajama shirts, and often the alarm gets muffled by pillows. Then, when it isn't muffled, it often wakes the rest of the house better than it does the deep-sleep bedwetter. And today's bedwetters are so skilled at tuning out phones, TVs, Nintendos, and sirens that many can easily tune out the audio alarms too!