Sales of incontinence pads for men have risen sharply in Danish supermarkets, and specialists say the trend may show that men are skipping the medical assessment and covered products the public system can offer.
DR reported on November 14, 2026 that the Danish pad manufacturer Abena has tripled its production of men’s incontinence pads over four years. In supermarkets, sales of products for men who struggle to hold urine or stool have risen markedly, according to the same report.
Supermarket chains would not tell DR how many units they sell. Salling Group did report a rise of 80 percent from 2021 to 2025. A photo caption in DR’s article states that production of men’s products at Abena in Aabenraa rose 339 percent over four years, a larger increase than the tripling described in the text.
Doctors say pads bought off the shelf point to missing help
Charlotte Graugaard-Jensen is a senior physician and head of the research unit at the department of urological surgery at Aarhus University Hospital. As she told DR, men may be coping at home with the problem instead of being examined and assessed by their own doctor or at a hospital.
Rie Seifert, a senior physician in urological surgery and deputy chair of the patient organization Kontinensforeningen, made a similar point to DR. Per her account, men who buy pads in supermarkets have not received help, because pads provided through the system would be paid for.
Both specialists told DR that the number of people contacting them has stayed stable while sales and production rise. Graugaard-Jensen said many patients can be helped to the point where pads are not needed. She also described a common belief that minor leaking is a normal part of aging, and said some men find it embarrassing to raise with a doctor.
According to Graugaard-Jensen, responsibility is shared. She said general practitioners need to point patients toward the services that exist, and that municipalities need to set up good continence clinics, known in Danish as kontinensklinikker.
Henriette Ry Lund Noesgaard is a general practitioner in Christiansfeld and an alternate on the board of Dansk Selskab for Almen Medicin, the Danish College of General Practitioners. As she described it to DR, men either come in late in the course of the problem or do not come at all. Often the issue first surfaces when the home nursing service or a wife says enough is enough.
No exact figures exist for how many people in Denmark live with incontinence. DR cites an estimate of 600,000, of whom a quarter are men. On its own website, Kontinensforeningen gives an undated figure of up to 500,000 children, women and men in Denmark with urinary and/or fecal incontinence.
What this means for foreign residents using Danish GPs
In Denmark, the first stop for a health problem like this is the praktiserende læge, the general practitioner assigned when you register with a CPR number and receive the yellow health card. The GP is the gatekeeper to hospital departments such as the urology unit in Aarhus, and visits are covered for residents with group 1 insurance. Our guide to healthcare in Denmark explains how the referral system works in practice.
The practical point in DR’s reporting is financial as well as medical. Seifert told DR that pads obtained through the system are paid for, which means that buying them in a supermarket is money spent on a product the public system may cover after an assessment. The municipal continence clinics named by Graugaard-Jensen are run locally, and DR’s article does not list which municipalities have them or what the criteria for access are, so availability has to be checked with your own kommune. For background on how the system is structured, see our overview of Danish healthcare for internationals.
