Benjamin Franklin reportedly suffered from it; so did Thomas Jefferson. So will most men, if they live long enough. This almost inevitable condition, called benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), is the enlargement of the prostate.
BPH is not prostate cancer, and having it doesn’t mean a man is more likely to get prostate cancer. Unlike prostate cancer, which grows outward and invades surrounding tissue, the cell growth in benign enlargement is inward, involving the prostate’s innermost core. The key word here is benign. (In this case, hyperplasia means an increase in the number of cells in the prostate, which causes it to become enlarged.) By itself, an enlarged prostate causes no symptoms and does no harm. If it weren’t for the fact that the prostate encircles the urethra (the tube that carries urine from the bladder through the prostate to the penis), BPH might never require treatment. It takes years to develop; in fact, most men don’t realize they have BPH until the prostate begins to tighten around the urethra and hinder urine flow.
Like wrinkles and gray hair, BPH seems to come with the territory of aging. One exception to this rule seems to be men in Asia; however, BPH—as well as prostate cancer, both of which were once rare in China and Japan—is becoming increasingly common in the Far East. Some scientists believe this is related to increased “Westernization” of the traditional diet, which is low in fat and animal protein.
In this country, studies have found that the incidence of BPH increases every year after age 40; it’s present in 50 percent of men aged 51 to 60, and 80 percent of men who reach age 80. Twenty-five percent of these men—more than 350 thousand a year in this country alone—eventually will require surgery (some of them more than once) to relieve the urinary obstruction BPH causes, making BPH the most common cause of surgery in American men over age 55. The yearly cost of BPH surgery in the United States is well over $3 billion. Clearly, BPH is a significant medical problem in this country, and the numbers will only increase as our lifespans continue to lengthen.
But if BPH is almost a certainty for most men, its annoying symptoms don’t have to be. Never before have so many good treatment options—medical and surgical—been available for BPH, and never before have so many men sought, and found, relief from their symptoms.
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Tags: Erectile Dysfunction | Men’s Health
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