Jul
15
OVER-THE-COUNTER,
THROUGH THE MAIL REMEDIES
Up to two years ago there had been a thriving over the counter and through the mails business of selling non-prescription compounds and “cures” and treatments for BPH.
Several years ago the Post Office Department began challenging many of these products sold through the mail on grounds that they were advertised misleadingly, and that they did not do what they claimed to do. Simple misrepresentation which could ban them from the mail.
That campaign by the U.S. postal authorities put a lot of people out of business who were selling various mail order non-prescription products to treat the prostate.
In March of 1990, the Food and Drug Adminstration said it would ban the sale of all non-prescription drugs used to treat enlargement of the prostate gland. The FDA said their review of the products found little evidence that any of them eliminated, arrested or treated the condition called benign prostatic hypertrophy. There was no date given for enforcing the ban or activating it.
The FDA, evidently not keeping up with current developments in the field, said surgery was the only effective treatment for BPH. A lot of urologists and specialists in the drug field will argue long and hard with their dictum with the various minor-surgical techniques we’ve discussed so far and the new drugs being developed.
What the FDA order does is ban non-prescription products that are advertised for the treatment of the prostate. They did not, and can not ban the sale of certain chemicals or compounds that have been considered by many since the Feinblatt/Gant study in 1958, to be beneficial to reduce BPH symptoms. These chemicals, mainly amino acids, are used in many of the soon to be banned products.
The study was conducted by Dr. Henry M. Feinblatt and Dr. Julian C. Gant and reported in the Journal of the Maine Medical Association in March of 1958, Volume 49, Number 3.
The study deals with the “Value of glycine, alanine and glutamic acid combination,” in the treatment of BPH.
These three chemicals have generally been used by dozens, perhaps hundreds of non-prescription compounds aimed at the general public since 1958.
Were these remedies straight out of the Wild West’s Medicine Man’s wagon of hokkum, or do they have some beneficial results that the traditionalist medical men on the FDA panels refuse to recognize?
Let’s look at the Feinblatt/Gant study that started it all.
The doctors had been using these three amino acids to treat their allergy patients. One of the patients mentioned that his urinary problems had improved since he’d been taking the medications from the doctors.
This stirred their imagination and the two medical men decided to try the three way amino acid combination on a group of non-allergy patients. The tests proved that these BPH sufferers had a dramatic relief from their urinary and BPH symptoms.
They moved from there to a clinically stringent test. A group of 40 patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia were treated with glycine-alanine-glutamic acid capsules for three months.
The patient age range was from 37 to 75 years and weigh from 101 to 192 pounds. BPH complaints ranged in duration at the start of the test from one to six years by various patients.
Placebo capsules were given to half of the patients and the amino acids to half. The patients response results over three months were charted. (Understand here that most such tests should be conducted over six months for best reliability.)
Results of the clinical tests were published in this way. For the control group taking the amino acids, the doctors said the size of the prostate was reduced in 92% of the cases. Nocturia was relieved in 95% of cases. Urgent urination was relieved in 81% and frequency in 73%. Discomfort was reduced in 71% of the cases. No such results were observed in the placebo taking control patients.
Other medical authorities have conducted tests along the same lines to confirm or deny the Feinblatt/Gant findings.
In the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society in 1962, Dr. Frederick Damrau of New York City reported such a test. His conclusions were similar. He said the combination of the three amino acids were used in a controlled cross-over test in forty cases of BPH. After three months on the test the patients reported nocturia was relieved or reduced in 95% of cases, urgency down in 81%, frequency lowered in 73% and delayed urination in 70%. Dr. Damrau said there were no adverse side effects or adverse reactions to the amino acids.
Other evidence the FDA ignored or discounted comes from Japan where a series of nine clinical tests were conducted at the department of urology of Kyoto University in Kyoto.
Some of these tests were double blind, which means there was no way the participants could have any idea if they were receiving the test material or a placebo.
The tests were published in the Acta Urological Japonica, volume 14, 1968.
Results for the amino acids therapy for hypertrophy of the prostate showed that the glycine-alanine-glutamic acid capsules were administered to thirty six cases of diagnosed uncomplicated BPH. The capsules gave satisfactory results in relieving subjective and objective symptoms and no side effects were observed in any of the patients.
In another of the tests, statistical results showed that improvement of symptoms were as follows:
• Urinary frequency reduced in 77.7%
• Nocturia relieved in 68.4%. Difficulty of urination relieved 77.3%
• Feeling of residual urine relieved in 71.4% Side effects were found in only one case and that was relieved with a gastrointestinal drug.
Now, one of the obvious questions is this: If these amino acids are so good, as these tests tend to show, why hasn’t one of the huge pharmaceutical giants leaped on the band wagon and brought out a tested, recognized and approved by FDA combination of these amino acids for the prostate sufferers?
The logical answer could be that their own testing did not match the results of the tests shown above. Or, the situation may be that the amino acids would not be a “proprietary” compound that they could patent, protect and profit from. It would be similar to spending millions to test a salt pill, and bring it out only to find that every othercompany could make the same salt pill.
Jul
14
HYTRIN IN PROSTATITE TREATMENT.
July 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment
HYTRIN …. AVAILABLE NOW
There is one drug on the market now, and available, that researchers at Abbott Laboratories of Chicago say will do the job of relieving BPH symptoms.
This is Hytrin, Abbot’s brand of terazosin, approved by the FDA in 1987 as a once-a-day pill for high blood pressure.
Dr. Atul Laddau, Abbott’s head of clinical research, says their own clinical tests of two years show that Hytrin relieves pressure on the urethra almost immediately and reduces other symptoms in about two thirds of the test patients with BPH. Some urologists are using Hytrin because it is now on the market, and because of the reported quick results. You don’t wait three months for relief here.
There are some unfortunate side effects with Hytrin. These are said to be dizziness, fatigue and occasionally fainting attacks. Even considering these side effects. Hytrin, with its two-thirds success rate and its availability, should be one of the drugs that you talk to your doctor about. There are other terazosin medications on the market beside Hytrin. Cost of these pills is said to be about $15 to $20 a month.
Jul
10
NON MAJOR-SURGICAL BPH TREATMENTS
July 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment
NON MAJOR-SURGICAL w5tbpqac7u
BPH TREATMENTS
Remember our typical early BPH patient example? Well your clock has swept around and you’re now 63, your minor BPH symptoms are more severe. You can’t get through a night without getting up three or four times to urinate. Everytime you wake up you leap out of bed and rush to the bathroom.
During the day you’ve had to hold up a board meeting while you went to the toilet. You can’t take a car drive of more than an hour without stopping. On your business flights you always get an aisle seat so you can hurry to the cramped convenience two or three times during a flight.
Besides that, sometimes it hurts like outrageous sin.
So, you go back to see your urologist. For the past eight years he’s been “monitoring” your BPH. At every examination he assures you that there are no hard lumps or irregular growth of the two side prostate lobes. He says that means you probably don’t have prostatic cancer.
What happens next? You want some relief, you want to feel better and be able to lead a more normal life. It’s a quality of life situation you’re talking about and you want some help, now!
Your urologist agrees and the two of you sit down to talk about the possible ways that your situation can be eased.
You realize that once the prostate starts to grow, nothing we know of now will stop it, except total sterilization. That’s out. What other remedies are there?
THE BALLOON METHOD
One of the new treatments now getting wider acceptance is the use of a balloon. Urologists have borrowed this technique from the heart surgeons. The physician inserts a small tube about the size of spaghetti into the urethra. On the far end of the tube is an un-inflated balloon.
When the balloon is in the proper position in the urethra within the enlarged prostate, the physician inflates the balloon. This inflation is held for different lengths of time. Some urologists use a ten minute period of pressure by the balloon within the urethra to force the urethra to expand back to its original position.
This forces the prostate tissues outward. In some cases the outer casing of the prostate is “cracked” or broken to allow the enlarged prostatic tissue to move in that direction and eliminate the pressure on the urethra.
Just who first developed this technique is not known, but Dr. Flavin Castaneda, a radiologist at St. Francis Medical Center at the University of Illinois in Peoria, is one of the pioneers in the use of this new technique. He says that seventy-five percent of the BPI I patients he has used the balloon treatment on have been symptom free for up to three years after the treatment.
In another part of the country, more than 60 patients have been treated with the balloon dilation method at the University of Minnesota.
For eighty percent of these patients the urination problem was eliminated or significantly eased. This was for patients with enlargement of the side lobes of the prostate. When the narrowing of the urethra was because of enlargement of the middle lobe, the success rate dropped to thirty to forty percent.
Dr. Israel Barken, a urologist in San Diego, California, has been using the balloon treatment.
He says for this procedure the patient is tranquilized and the urethra is numbed with a local anesthetic. Then a thin, flexible tube with a balloon on the tip is inserted into the urethra and guided to the narrowed portion. The balloon is then inflated. He says he uses a time of about 20 minutes. This is an outpatient treatment and no hospitalization is needed. If the patient wants the procedure done in the office or the hospital, he can be accomodated.
Dr. Barken says before this procedure is undertaken, tests are made to assess the extent of the obstruction and to determine its precise location. At this point other tests are done to be sure there is no cancer present or any prostatic infection.
A catheter is left in the bladder until the following morning and then removed.
Dr. Lester A. Klein, an urologist at the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California says that at first the balloon treatment was effective on only about thirty percent of the cases. But now with doctors screening out the patients with poor chances for success with the balloon dilation, Dr. Klein says there is a success rate of eighty-six percent.
Dr. Klein is the designer of one of the balloon devices used in the operation and does the procedure himself at Scripps.
Dr. Barken has developed a similar technique using the same principles as Dr. Klein, but without the use of the sophisticated multiple balloons. This helps bring the cost down tremendously.
At this point in mid 1990, urologists who use the balloon technique have praise for it. They say it is effective, and is easy to do with the least amount of stress and worry on the patient. It is non-surgical, and as of yet, there have been no side effects reported. These three factors make it a favorite with patients as well especially when contrasted with surgery.
Another factor is the cost. While few hard figures are obtainable, one Boston urologist said the average total cost for a balloon dilation in the hospital is about $3,600. For the same TURP operation the cost is about $12,000. TURP surgery is one of the operations that remove part or all of the growth in the prostate.
A medical writer in the Wall Street Journal estimated that more than 2,000 of these balloon treatments have been done. A CBS news report about the same procedure said that over 5,000 of them have been undertaken in the past two years.
Not everyone agrees with the use of the balloon dilation treatment. Dr. John W. Schumacher, M.D. from Minneapolis says that this ignores the 10 percent of those who do get a TURP operation and the pathologist find that they have prostate cancer as well. Dr. Schumacher says that if a hundred thousand balloon treatments are used for BPH, then ten thousand of those men who have Stage A or B Cancer won’t find out about it — perhaps until it’s too late to cure them.
Dr. William J. Somers, M.D., a urologist, agrees. He puts hidden cancer of BPH patients at twenty to twenty-five percent.
He says that the use of the balloon dilation or drugs to reduce BPH symptoms is actually doing those twenty-five percent of the patients with hidden cancer a disservice. Other experts say these hidden cancers are rarely fatal in nature.
He maintains that there is no accurate way of determining who has prostate cancer and who doesn’t. Biopsy and ultrasound can help, but he says unless shavings of the gland are examined in a pathology laboratory, the cancer can metastasize and no one will know about it until it’s too late.
Dr. Walter Desmond, Jr. Ph.D. and research manager at Hybritech in San Diego has a slightly different view of the evaluation of the scrapings from a TURP operation. His firm makes a test called the PSA to evaluate the prostate specific antigen level in the blood. A high level can indicate the strong possibility of a silent cancer in the prostate.
He says that some pathologists fail to examine all of the tissue taken out during a TURP operation. Those who don’t evaluate all of the scrapings are shortchanging the patient.
He says the odds are even greater that a hidden cancer may be missed because a proper TURP cuts out the central part of the prostate tissue. The great majority of small cancers start not at the center of the prostate but near or on the surface of the lobes of the prostate, and these areas are often never touched by the surgeon’s electric knife when he cuts out the new canal for the urine to pass through.
Dr. Desmond seems to be saying that if pathologists are finding small cancers in the ten percent, or as high as 30 percent by some scientific evaluations of the TURP scrapings, then the true figure must be much higher than that taking into consideration the two factors presented here.
His slant seems to be that a chemical test such as PSA offers a much better method to detect early prostate cancer than any other method.
Jul
7
HOW TO COPE WITH EARLY BPH. LIVING WITH BPH. Early Stages of an Enlarged Prostate.
July 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment
HOW TO COPE
WITH EARLY BPH
Living with the early stages of an enlarged prostate isn’t all that hard:
This is true. Remember, you had BPH for eight to ten years before it caused you any problems at all. You might have had some mild symptoms for another two or three years before you realized it and found out what was causing them. Now you know.
Now is no time to panic. So these problems caused by BPH area small inconvenience, they are something you can learn to live with. The alternative is not a happy thought.
Let’s go back to our typical case history. This gentleman is the one who is sixty years old and has the three most minor of BPH symptoms: a brief hesitancy when urinating, a slower, less forceful stream, and he usually gets up once a night to urinate.
The secret here is that you know what the cause is of these minor problems, which means you can learn to manage them. You have managed a lot of things in your life, right? First the other kids in your family, then a wife, then your own kids, then that business and all the people you had under you. Compared to that, managing early BPH is a breeze.
First the worry. The experts say again and again that BPH is not cancer, has no connection with prostate cancer, does not lead to cancer and is an entirely separate ailment. So get that out of your mind.
You don’t have prostate cancer, it’s only BPH.
Urologists fight this misconception all the time and gradually they’re winning. They point out that cancer of the prostate is almost always on the outside of the prostate lobes. The enlarged prostate grows inward and outward. There is absolutely no casual relationship between the two.
Now, one more concern with prostate cancer. When surgery is needed for BPH, usually at a much later time than in a man’s fifties or early sixties, there is a finding that about ten percent of the BPH prostates will be found to have a cancer.
Remember, cancer can strike any part of the body at any time in life. It has no connection to BPH. When these cancers are found they are not in the usual places where they could be easily diagnosed during your regular BPH exams. So in reality the BPH surgery is a stroke of luck since most of these cancers are just beginning and are caught quickly so they can be eradicated more easily.
So, from here on we don’t worry about BPH causing or being tied in with prostate cancer in any way. Clear?
LIVING WITH BPH
Urologists point out that the minor symptoms of BPH, often the initial ones, may be the only troubles a man suffers with BPH for as much as ten to fifteen years. That means you shouldn’t even be thinking about or concerned with any worry about prostate surgery or other treatment now. Dump it right out of your computer memory hard disc. Why worry about something that isn’t going to happen for ten to fifteen years? You’ll have plenty of time to fret and stew about it and discuss it with your urologist when the time comes. By then some even better treatments undoubtedly will be developed.
Concentrate on today, and how to make your life pleasant and interesting and fulfilling, right now! in spite of BPH.
We know that there is no “cure” for BPH. You can’t take a pill and like a headache your BPH will just go away. It isn’t that kind of a problem. Even with our miracle modern medical cures, there is nothing even on the drawing boards that will magically cure BPH. So we practice positive thinking and forget about that and move on to areas of behavior that we can and should do something about.
Plain old fashioned horse-sense. With the decline of the horse as the basic transportation unit of Americans, not much is heard anymore about horse-sense. Too bad. Horse sense has shaken down to “common sense”, which is almost as good.
For example, it makes no sense to drink two gallons of water a day when you know you’re going to have to urinate most of that water the same day. Don’t overload your urinary system. The less you drink the less you’ll have to urinate.
Don’t carry this to extremes. The body is at least 1,259 percent water. You need water, fluids, to survive. But there is a happy medium. Some doctors say a man should drink eight, eight ounce glasses of water a day. That’s half a gallon. Actually what they mean is that the body should intake that much fluid a day: coffee, water, milk, soup, colas, juice, any fluid should count.
Many other doctors say this is much more fluid than the average man needs. Your body will tell you when it wants a drink. As a common sense living-with-BPH, start cutting down on your fluids a little at a time. You’ll be urinating less, but still enough. Talk to your urologist or doctor about this and find out what the minimum daily need is for intake fluids for a man of your size and activity. It may be much less than you suspect.
If you do manual labor in the hot sun all day, you’ll need more water than if you’re in an air-conditioned office where you work on a computer. Your doctor will be able to help you here.
TIME YOUR FLUID INTAKE
If nocturia bothers you, and you’re getting up three times a night to urinate, try limiting your fluid intake in the evening. One doctor suggested not to drink any fluids for four hours before retiring. That way your body will have processed your fluids, and passed them well before your sleeping time.
Using a modified system such as this (some men have one small drink at dinner and nothing after that) many BPH patients can cut to once their nocturnal urination. Now that is a real blessing if you can go from three risings to only one a night. This is a prime example of how you can manage your own life to reduce the interference of BPH with your normal activities.
Jul
7
WHAT PROBLEMS CAN EXTREME PROSTATE
ENLARGEMENT CAUSE?
Silent Prostatism. Sometimes the prostate will enlarge and there are none of the usual symptoms. The urethra continues to close but somehow the man simply doesn’t realize the problem or decides that he’s just getting old and the “water works” sometimes doesn’t work right for him.
If this condition builds and builds, more and more urine can be left in the bladder that can’t be expelled in urination. This can result in a serious problem. The patient will become excessively tired and feel weak, he will be irritable and could suddenly collapse or even lapse into a coma.
When large amounts of urine are left in the bladder and it isn’t strong enough to expel the liquid through a narrowing urethra, serious damage can occur. This can lead to a serious backflow pressure of the urine on the kidneys. At the most serious, such a problem can cause kidney failure and a quick death.
In cases like this the patient needs to get to a hospital quickly so a catheter can be used to drain the bladder. With the emptying of the bladder, the patient will feel much better almost at once. Then the doctors will watch to see if any permanent damage was done to the kidneys and if so what additional treatment might be needed.
Depending on the seriousness of the situation, the patient’s normal kidney function should come back after a week to three months. At that time the prostate should be checked for size to see if prostate surgery or some other treatment is required.
CONGESTION OF THE PROSTATE
Sometimes after normal BPH symptoms in a patient, an urologist will find only a moderately enlarged prostate but one that is mildly congested. There often is no sign of infection. Typically there might be a minor amount of urine that can’t be drained from the bladder during urination.
Often there will be some form of obstruction at the bladder outlet which also restricts bladder emptying.
At this point there is no major problem for the patient and he would be put on a maintenance program to have his prostate checked regularly.
As the prostate grows and the bladder muscles are forced to work harder and harder to push the urine through the narrowing urethra, the bladder can become fatigued. In some cases the bladder will simply quit functioning and urine buildup occurs in the bladder.
This can form a place where bacteria can grow and multiply rapidly. When this happens the patient feels a burning pain when he urinates. Sometimes the urine will have a bad odor and traces of blood can show in the urine.
A danger here is urinary infection, which is usually signalled in the patient by a burning sensation when urinating, chills or fever and the intensification of his regular BPH symptoms.
Here, as in other early symptoms of BPH, the patient may go for several years without any more serious problems than his minor BPH problems.
On the other hand the congestion may increase, and if this happens the patient’s urologist may suggest a prostate massage. Here the prostate is massaged digitally through the rectum and the congested fluid is expelled. This makes the heaviness vanish and a more normal life returns.
The urologist may suggest that a patient have regular prostate massages to relieve the congestion. Or it may be relieved by regular ejaculations through intercourse or masturbation.
Some urologists never recommend repeated prostatic massages. But all suggest in situations like this that the patient should avoid long periods of exposure to intense cold weather, should avoid most spicy foods, should sharply reduce the use of alcoholic beverages, should avoid antihistamines, and they recommend the patient to take warm baths often.
Any shift or intensifying or change in symptoms of the BPH should be reported to the patient’s physician or urologist at once.
Jul
7
BPH SYMPTOMS. WHAT CAUSES BPH?
July 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment
WHAT CAUSES BPH?
No one knows what causes BPH. Just why the prostate starts to enlarge itself in the forty to fifty male years is not understood.
There are two significant factors in this mystery that have been tied down by medical research over the years. One is that a man who has been surgically or hormonally castrated, eliminating the male hormone from his body, never develops an enlarged prostate.
The other uncontested fact is that the onset of BPH is started only with the passage of time.
Castration at an early age to eliminate BPH is a totally unthinkable idea. The other alternative, death at an early age is equally ridiculous as a prevention of BPH.
Which leaves medical science still in kindergarten when it comes to determining the cause of BPH and the chances of scientifically developing a preventive drug or routine and this stops any work on a cure.
Many medical studies have been made in an effort to isolate some other common factor in BPH patients. So far all of these human factors have been ruled out: specific blood types, coronary heart disease, celibacy, hypertension, use of alcohol or tobacco, industrial and environmental conditions.
One constant has been determined: By the age of sixty years, fifty percent of all men will have, to some degree, an enlarged prostate whether or not it is bothering them. By the time American men reach their eightieth birthday, only five out of one hundred will not have BPH.
After broad studies involving Asian men, it was determined that as a group they had fewer cases of BPH and prostatic cancer. However Asian men who moved to the US for a period of time had a significantly increased rate of both BPH and prostatic cancer.
Since Asians typically have had a low cholesterol and low red meat diet, it is speculated that diet may have a larger impact on BPH and prostatic cancer than had been previously thought. With the current wave of anti-cholesterol and anti-fat foods including the campaign against red meat, American men could be experiencing a lower rate of BPH and prostatic cancer in the future.
Is a man’s sex life in any way connected with the cause of BPH or prostatic cancer? A man’s sexual life appears to have no bearing whatsoever on the development of BPH or cancer of the prostate. However, sudden surges in sexual activity, or sudden celibacy often does affect the prostate. These situations will be discussed in a later section.
SO WHAT HAPPENS TO ME NEXT?
Let’s say that you’re reading this book in the first place
because you had some questions about your general health,
or your urination, or your prostate, and after reading the
list of symptoms, bingo! you have three of the symptoms.
Let’s say that you have a hesitancy to start to urinate,
you have a noticeably reduced stream, and you’ve been getting up about three A.M. every night to urinate. What should you do next?
Pick up the phone and get an appointment with your family doctor or call a urologist. It’s time you found out just what’s going on and how serious your BPH really is.
Your next move is to have an examination by a medical professional or a specialist. Just how does a doctor examine you for possible BPH or other prostatic troubles?
Jul
7
BENIGN PROSTATIC HYPERPLASIA (BPH)
Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia, sometimes called Hypertrophy, is the medical way of saying that the prostate gland has enlarged. In early stages this enlargement may not cause any problems. As it enlarges more and more with a man’s increasing age, it may squeeze the urethra smaller and smaller.
This reduces the force and size of your urine stream, and if left untreated, BPH could lead to the closure of the urethra resulting in severe sickness and even death.
Doctors say that in BPH the glandular tissue within the prostate capsule enlarges, grows, and no one seems to know why it happens or how to prevent or stop this growth.
This is a benign growth. That means it is not cancerous, it does not spread to other parts of the body or attack other tissues or cells. If it were malignant, as in cancer of the prostate, it would destroy and attack other tissue or cells and spread.
In the drawings here, notice how the urethra is fully open in the first one. It passes through the prostate allowing normal flow of urine from the bladder through the urethra and out the penis.
In the second drawing, the darker growth of benign tissue has begun and already has taken the bulge out of the urethra. In the third drawing, the BPH tissue has almost closed the tube the urine must pass through, making urination extremely difficult and bringing on all sorts of BPH symptoms and problems.
We come back to the apple example. Your prostate is like an apple with the core taken out. Through the core goes the urethra. The size of the urethra may begin to shrink when the prostate starts to enlarge when most men are about forty to forty-five. Often by the time a man is in his fifties he’s noticing some changes in his urination pattern.
It is just outside the urethra where the benign growth of the prostatic tissue begins, and it usually grows in both directions, which at once impacts the size of the urethra.
The growth of the tissue usually is not uniform or consistent all along the urethra. It may develop in one section and not in another, so the urethra is not compressed all along its length, at least not at first.
However, as with any tube or a garden hose, pressure at any one spot can shut off the tube entirely and cause all sorts of problems.
The new growth in the prostate consists of the same types of tissue as the normal prostate gland has, but in different proportions. The new, benign growth is going to have more of the glandular type of tissue.
The new growth in the prostate usually develops in both an inward and outward direction, toward the urethra and toward the exterior of the gland. When it grows outward it compresses the normal prostatic tissue against the sturdy outer capsule of the prostate.
When this outer growth takes place in the two lobes of the prostate nearest the rectum, a specialist can feel this with a digital examination. The outward growth does not narrow the urethra so there would be none of the usual BPH symptoms.
In most cases, however, when there is an outward growth of the tissue, it also grows toward the inside as well. Now we get the narrowing of the urethra over the years, and the normal symptoms of BPH.
The prostate has several sections, and digital examination can touch only the back part of the prostate. The sections that can’t be felt can harbor benign or malignant growth. This is one of the reasons for other tests for prostatic cancer that we’ll explain in detail later.