The epidemiology and factors associated with nocturnal enuresis and its severity in primary school children in Taiwan

Purpose: To investigate the prevalence of nocturnal enuresis among children in elementary school in Taiwan and to evaluate its associated factors and severity. Materials and Methods: A randomly selected cross-sectional study was conducted from elementary schools in Changhua county, Taiwan in 2003. In all, 9228 questionnaires were sent to 46 schools in 26 districts. Results: A total of 92.1% (8496/9228) of questionnaires were completed. The overall prevalence of nocturnal enuresis was 6.8%. The ratio of male to female was about 1.5 (8.0% vs. 5.5%). The prevalence of enuresis according to age group declined from 12.5% at 6 years to 2.0% at 12 years. The prevalence of enuresis in the urban area did not show significant difference from that of rural area (6.2% vs. 6.9%). Of the factors associated with enuresis, gender, age, urinary frequency or urgency, heredity, drinking habit before sleep and difficulty in waking showed significant difference after multiple logistic regression analysis. After multivariate analysis, difficulty in waking and time of wetting were the only factors significantly associated with the severity of enuresis. Conclusion: Our investigation showed the prevalence of enuresis is similar to those reports from the north of Taiwan and most of other western countries, but higher than that of China and Hong-Kong. Difficulty in waking and time of wetting were the only factors significantly associated with the severity of enuresis.