Benign prostatic enlargement – symptoms

by | Cancer Care, Men's Health

What are the symptoms of benign prostate enlargement?

The symptoms of benign prostate enlargement, or benign prostatic hyperplasia as we call it, are really broken down into 2 different types. We can call them obstructive symptoms. So you can imagine that if you’ve got a tube that’s being constricted, which is what happens, then you can get difficulty starting the stream, you can get a slow urinary stream, you might have a flow that’s intermittent or cuts out while you’re actually urinating, and then towards the end of the flow you might have some dribbling or a feeling that you haven’t actually emptied the bladder properly. That’s, again, because you’ve got this increased resistance caused by the extra prostatic tissue at the base of the bladder. So they’re the obstructive symptoms. But we think that those that the change in the bladder outlet can then also cause changes to the bladder function itself and as a result, you can have irritative symptoms such as urgency of urination, when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, or frequency of urination and the other symptom is nocturia, which is probably the commonest of all in fact, which is going to the toilet to urinate at nighttime. Usually, once a night is classified as pretty normal, but if it’s twice or more then it can be quite a bother to men, especially if they find it hard to get back to sleep.

Dr Jeremy Grummet, Urological Surgeon. Assoc Prof Jeremy Grummet is a urological surgeon with specific training and expertise in urological cancers. He performs MRI-targeted transperineal biopsy for maximal accuracy and minimal risk in prostate cancer diagnosis.