Enlarged prostate as a quality-of-life issue

Enlarged prostate as a quality-of-life issue.

A well-dressed businessman stops at the urinal before an important meeting, then turns to the faucet, checks for witnesses and splashes handfuls of water on his trousers and shirt to camouflage his accident. Entering the conference room, the damp, middle-aged executive curses the sink for its spray.

This charade, and others equally creative, may be repeated countless times in bathrooms and boardrooms everywhere as ageing men find ways to cope with the embarrassing symptoms of a condition called benign prostatic hyperplasia, or enlargement of the prostate.

Men with the condition are often unable to empty their bladders. They may feel the need to rush to the bathroom several times an hour. Once there, they might face a frustrating wait for the urine to flow. After a trip to the toilet, leftover urine might continue to dribble, making a grown man look and feel as if he had just wet his pants.

Besides being annoying and embarrassing, an enlarged prostate can cause permanent damage to the kidneys and the urinary tract if left untreated.
Although it is rarely talked about in tones louder than a whisper, prostate enlargement is the most common urologic ailment for men. About half of all men can expect to develop some urination difficulties because of prostate enlargement by the time they turn 70. And almost all men - 80 per cent - will develop the problem some time in their lives.

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The first sign a man will notice is that his urine stream is weaker than before. "People will stand in front of the urinal and take forever to empty the bladder," says Wurzel.

As the problem progresses, less urine will come out, leaving sufferers with a constant sensation of fullness. Ultimately, there may be too little force to control the flow. Urine simply dribbles out-often in all the wrong places.

People try and take drugs to shrink or relax the prostate's grip on the urethra. While the drugs have been the only alternative for men who do not want surgery, they have several drawbacks. Besides causing dizziness in a large percentage of the men who take them, the drugs are also expensive and must be taken properly and regularly.

Recently, however, men have found some relief with a new treatment that uses microwave-generated heat to shrink the prostate without harming any of the other sensitive sexual and urinary tract organs that so closely surround it.