Prostate Problems for Men

Men in general are most likely to have problems in the prostate when these individuals grow older. This is the information doctors found after doing research from men who are 50 years and over. There are 3 common problems that men face. These are namely:

prostate enlargement (benign prostatic hyperplasia),
inflammation (prostatitis),
and prostate cancer.

Among the three, prostate cancer is the usual occurrence in men. The disease starts when cells in the prostate grow rapidly and these spread out to other parts of the person’s body. Doctors call this spreading as metastasis. Since most of these cells are not harmful, there is no cause yet for alarm.

When these get bigger, these are called tumors. If these tumors settle in the person’s lymph node, which could be confirmed during a medical examination, there is a high chance that the person has already developed this disease.

Science has not yet discovered what causes men to have prostate cancer. Annually, this only ranks second to lung cancer as the highest number of fatalities among men. The first signs of a person that has this disease can be seen in the color of the urine, the more times that the person has to urinate and dribbling or hesitancy of urine is experienced.

If a patient has been diagnosed during the early stages of the disease, doctors are able to stop it before it gets any worse.

First, the person can undergo surgery to have it removed. The person will feel some pain when it is over but this is seen as normal. The side effect of this is the person will likely be impotent and suffer from urinary incontinence.

Another way to treat this is through radiation therapy. Though this is painless procedure, the side effect of going through with this will let the person experience diarrhea, uncomfortable urination, hair loss in the pelvic area and in cases making the patient impotent.

Hormone therapy can also work since this too is a painless procedure. The downside to this is that the person will become impotent and experience hot flashes from time to time. Estrogen is sometimes used in hormone therapy. The side effects of which are vomiting, nausea, swelling or tenderness in the patient’s breasts.

A new way of treating prostate cancer is through proton therapy. It uses high energy proton particles that are produced by a synchrotron or an accelerator to destroy the tumor without harming the surrounding tissues.

This is similar to chemotherapy and hormone therapy which is a painless and bloodless procedure. Unlike the other two, more than 700 patients have agreed to take part in this treatment and none have reported of any side effects after the procedure was completed.

The patient can choose to have this done on an outpatient basis so the person can still perform one’s daily routine. It will take 7 weeks for it to be finished.

Medical science has improved through the years. This has increased the survival rate of a person to close to 100%. By being able to detect this early, more men can be saved from this disease.

Since this problem only happens when a man reaches the age of 50, the individual should be prepared to face this disease during the early stages by having an annual PSA screening test and a Digital Rectal Exam.