Interstitial Cystitis: A Bladder Disease Finds Legitimacy

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Abstract
Once thought to be a rare bladder disease in postmenopausal women, interstitial cystitis (IC) has appeared to increase dramatically in prevalence, particularly in young women, over the past decade. IC is an inflammatory bladder condition of unknown etiology, whose symptoms mimic that of an acute urinary tract infection: severe suprapubic pressure and pain, frequency, and urgency. Standard urine cultures are negative, and the symptoms do not respond to antibiotics. An estimated 450,000 people in the United States have IC, 90% of them women. The classic form of IC, first described in the early 1900s, was defined by the presence of "elusive ulcers" on the bladder wall. The nonulcer type of IC was not described until 1978, and there was considerable resistance to this new concept. It is only recently, due in large part to the Interstitial Cystitis Association (ICA), a patient advocacy group, that the public and the medical community have been reeducated about the disease. It is now known that the majority of patients with IC have the nonulcer type. As a result, IC, which previously had been overlooked and gone undiagnosed for nearly a century, has new found legitimacy both in clinical practice and within the scientific research community. It is for this reason that we are now seeing a dramatic increase in the number of patients being diagnosed with IC.