Will a person be woken up by the urge to urinate during sleep? Will the bladder be ruptured by the urge to urinate?

Getting up every morning is a difficult thing for most people, but sometimes, when you are sleeping soundly in bed, a "third party" suddenly appears and wakes you up immediately, and then you abandon the warm quilt, get out of bed and go to the bathroom.

That’s right, this “third party” is the urge to urinate (you told me that you were woken up by the urge to defecate, sorry, we can’t be friends), let’s talk about it today.

First, let’s take a look at where urine comes from?

Urine is produced by the urinary system in the human body.

When we drink water, the body will use most of it. The remaining small amount of excess water and useless substances in the blood will go to the kidneys, where they will form urine (after being reabsorbed by the renal tubules), but they will not be stored in the kidneys because every inch of space here is valuable and there is no room for garbage.

Just like the garbage disposal site in our daily life, there is also a temporary garbage disposal site in the human body. After urine is formed in the kidneys, it goes to this "temporary garbage disposal site" - the bladder - along the ureters.

The bladder is a bit like a ball with better elasticity. As urine is continuously injected, its volume will continue to increase. This is the last barrier for urine in the human body to "let itself go".

The bladder is mainly composed of three structures, namely the serosal layer of the outer wall, the muscular layer and the mucosal layer of the inner wall. There is also a urothelial barrier on the surface of the mucosal layer to prevent infection.

Among the smooth muscle fibers of the muscular layer, there lives a guard who guards the "garbage disposal site" - the detrusor muscle, which controls the discharge of urine.

The storage capacity of the human bladder is about 300~500ML. When the amount of urine begins to increase, the stretch receptors in the bladder will send a signal to the parasympathetic nervous system: "Hurry up and tell the detrusor muscle, the bladder is almost full!", and the urge to urinate arises.

Then, after receiving the signal (muscarinic receptor), the detrusor muscle immediately reports the situation to the central nervous system through the shortcut channel - ordinary visceral afferent fibers.

After the central nervous system gives the command "OK, pee", the detrusor muscle begins to contract, compressing the urethral sphincter to relax, and then the urine finally "pours out" from the bladder.

Although it's a long story, the process actually takes only a few seconds.

Now that we know the formation and excretion of urine, how do we get woken up by the urge to urinate while we are sleeping?

This has to start from childhood. Because the baby's central nervous system is still immature, and the bladder capacity is only 1/10 of that of an adult, and the muscle contraction force is not strong, when the baby's bladder senses that the urine has reached a certain amount, it will "open the floodgates" on its own, which is not controlled by the brain at all.

As we grow older, we begin to mature in all aspects. We no longer urinate whenever we want, but choose the time and place to urinate independently based on our brain’s judgment.

Because of this, when you sleep, when the excess waste produced by metabolism in the blood forms urine, the bladder will begin to continuously send signals to the brain saying "Please pee, I can't hold it anymore"!!

However, the brain will evaluate the signal strength by itself. Generally, it will ignore signals of 100 to 200 ml. Only when the amount in the bladder has to be released will the brain tell you to get up and urinate to avoid bursting the bladder.

Let’s interact. Do you think your bladder will be ruptured by urine?

Historically, the famous 16th-century astronomer Tycho Brahe ruptured his bladder due to holding his urine. This was further confirmed as the cause of Brahe's death after Denmark and the Czech Republic conducted a chemical analysis of his body in 2012.

It is said that during a royal banquet, Tycho did not want to lose his integrity and left the scene, so he held back the strong urge to urinate. However, the banquet lasted for a long time, and his small bladder was obviously unable to withstand the strong flow of urine, which eventually led to a rupture of the bladder...