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Hi!

I think it's a real pity that we don't know much about diuretics.  People say tea, coffee, alcohol, and all sorts of other things have a diuretic effect, but how strong is this effect?  Does drinking energy drink with vodka make you have to pee more than just energy drink?  Will drinking coffee instead of water make you have to go 50% sooner, or 10%?  These are questions I'd like to have some answers to.

I'd love to just measure all this stuff myself, but (not being an anime protagonist) I don't have a harem of girls willing to do whatever I say.  Fortunately, I have the internet, and that's almost as good.

As I write this, there are 96 members online.  If everyone does a hold and posts their results, we'll have a pretty reasonable dataset to go on from.  It won't be perfect, but it'll give you some idea.  If half the people do the hold again with coffee and half do it again with alcohol, we'll have enough data (N=48) to see what kind of effect it is.  Again, won't be perfect, but it's better than what we have now.

So, without further ado!  If you want to participate: great!  Please don't drink anything for at one hour, and then drink 200 ml (=6.8 fl oz, from now on "one cup") every quarter of an hour.  Pee before you start drinking, and then hold it.  I would love it if you gave (some of) the following information:

Time without drinking beforehand:
Drink used:
Time until first urge:
Total cups finished:
Time until pee:
Urge when peed:
Volume peed:

Don't worry if you can't provide everything — most important is the time until you pee.  If you deviate in some ways (for example, by stopping with drinking early) then that's fine, but please mention what way.  For "urge when peed", let's keep it simple and choose between "desperate" (have to pee bad but could hold for a while longer), "bursting" (about to pee yourself) and "wet" (well...).  More details are of course appreciated :)

This might feel like an ambitious project, but if everyone does even just two or three holds we'll be a lot closer to having some information.

About the drinks: since we want a baseline, I suggest water to start with.  If anyone wants to go for a second round, I think tea and cola are a good next step.  Speaking of which, don't hesitate to do the same hold twice if you want to: the more comparable data, the less chance whatever we see is just random noise.

To set an example, I'm going to start a hold in exactly one hour.  Join me on the IRC or on Discord and let's do science. :D

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Sadly, the issue is you really need to know blood volumes before and after. If you are someone who is usually not at a lot of blood volume and doesn't have a lot of water inside of cells, a diuretic isn't going to do anything. Diuretics do make you "pee more" but that's because they lower your blood volume. So repeatedly trials in a short period of time isn't likely going to show much, and comparing one person to others is even less valid. This kind of project would need to done for each individual, with repeated tests, over weeks or months, and with a reliable way of knowing how hydrated a person was before each test.

 

While I appreciate wanting to get the data, because you said you wanted to do science... the way you have this set up really won't tell you anythng that is possible to compare.

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18 minutes ago, LOLC2k said:

Sadly, the issue is you really need to know blood volumes before and after. If you are someone who is usually not at a lot of blood volume and doesn't have a lot of water inside of cells, a diuretic isn't going to do anything. Diuretics do make you "pee more" but that's because they lower your blood volume. So repeatedly trials in a short period of time isn't likely going to show much, and comparing one person to others is even less valid. This kind of project would need to done for each individual, with repeated tests, over weeks or months, and with a reliable way of knowing how hydrated a person was before each test.

 

While I appreciate wanting to get the data, because you said you wanted to do science... the way you have this set up really won't tell you anythng that is possible to compare.

That's definitely true.  There's going to be individual variation, and variation due to circumstances, and a whole lot of other variation that I really can't account for.  (Any serious research group would ask people for their age, gender, and medical history, after all; can't really do that here.)  But I hope that by getting enough responses I can balance those details out by looking at averages.  Your observation, for example, can't be corrected for, but we'll notice that some people are affected a lot by diuretics and others much less.  Even with such a hodge-podge approach we can still ask questions like "is being affected binary, or is there a scale?"  Heck, I find even the question "will the average time-to-pee on coffee be lower than on water?" interesting.

So while I understand your concern that what we'll get is random noise, I'd rather be optimistic and say "oh well" once we get that than start out with that assumption and keep viewing diuretics as magic potions that make you pee more/sooner/worse in some a priori unquantifiable way. =)

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Have to agree with LOLC2k here and indeed go further. 

You have to contend with:

1. Input (drinking) rate

2. Rate of absorption by digestive system, and hence into the blood, which is highly dependent on recent food consumption ( a recent meal will slow down subsequent liquid absorption - it'll queue in the stomach behind the meal, so to speak).

3. Rate of urine production by kidneys extracting from the blood. This is controlled by a feedback system so as to keep the blood water content right. This feedback system has certain performance constraints such as time lags and maximum kidney production rate. 

I suspect it is the kidney rate that is affected by diuretics. 

To get any meaningful data I think you would need to control the various variables as much as you can. For example, no food in last x hours, maintain a constant known  drinking rate over a sufficient period of time to achieve steady state conditions with urine production at, say, 50% max kidney rate, pee frequently measuring volume produced to determine a pee rate then take the diuretic and look for any resulting change or blip in the pee rate. 

It might be interesting to do this but somewhat time consuming. I'd allow a whole day to do it, then repeat several times for data averaging purposes. 

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I have fixed the first point, and I've somewhat limited points two and three with the restriction of no drinking in the last hour.  Again, it isn't perfect.  I could require anyone who wanted to do this to set aside a whole day for it.  Maybe I'd even get two or three responses.  The information would be more accurate, and would certainly not have any kind of statistical significance due to the tiny number of participants.  I'd much rather give people something they can do without too much trouble instead of their usual hold, and hope that this sufficiently increases the number of responses that the averages become meaningful.

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