This is compared to 18 per cent of children who were prescribed desmopressin and then ceased taking the medication. Approximately fifteen to 20 per cent of five year olds and one to three per cent of teenagers routinely wet the bed during sleep.
Alarms that buzz, ring or light up when a child wets the bed are more effective at stopping bedwetting than medications like the drug commonly used to prevent urination, according to a new review of recent studies.
About half of those children (55 percent) relapsed into bedwetting after quitting the alarm treatment, compared with 99 percent of children who received no bedwetting treatments.
" On average, there were three fewer wet nights per week using the standard alarm," compared with no alarm, conclude Dr. Cathryn Glazener of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland and colleagues in the review.
Children taking the drug desmopressin stopped bedwetting faster than those using the alarm system, but "there is no reliable evidence that the drugs are effective after treatment has stopped," says Glazener.
Only 18 percent of children taking the drug stayed dry in the weeks after the therapy, compared with 67 percent of children using alarms, the researchers found.
The review appears in the most recent issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research.
Nighttime bedwetting, or enuresis, affects 15 percent to 20 percent of 5-year-olds and 1 percent to 3 percent of teens, according to a 2003 report by the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Bedwetting is not physically harmful, but it can cause "stigma, stress and inconvenience" and increase the risk of emotional and physical abuse by disapproving parents, say the Cochrane reviewers.
Glazener and colleagues analyzed 55 trials comparing the effectiveness of bedwetting alarms to several other therapies.
In several of the studies, researchers treated children with a combination of an alarm system and a drug like desmopressin, a strategy that may be especially useful for treating bedwetting over several months, according to Greene.