An enlarged prostate is a health issue that typically starts impacting men over the age of 50. Dr. Orrenzo Snyder, a urologist at Comanche County Memorial Hospital, said men normally see a slow change and will ignore it for years.
“All men are going to have an enlarging prostate. It’s just whether they’re going to have symptoms or not,” he said.
Dr. Snyder said there are changes to watch out for.
“Weakening of the stream,” he said, “maybe you’re getting up two or three times at night, maybe there’s frequency of urination – you’re peeing every two hours or maybe every hour. Maybe you feel like you’re not emptying. Those are the times that you’re going to want to go in.”
When you get checked out, he said they’ll screen for prostate cancer.
“So we follow and recommend PSA testing from the age of 50 until about 65,” Dr. Snyder said.
Dr. Snyder said sometimes the symptoms can overlap. So men can be diagnosed with an overactive bladder instead.
“Sometimes they’ll get on treatment for the bladder, and they have the same symptoms – it’s a weak stream first, and then the frequency was second, so sometimes they get on the wrong treatments,” he said.
Which is why he encourages people to go to their doctor when they start noticing changes. If a man is suffering from an enlarged prostate, he says he typically tries treating it with medicine first and then surgery if needed.
“The surgeries that are available, they’re called minimally invasive,” Dr. Snyder said. “So, for me, outpatient surgeries. Light anesthesia, you wake up pretty quick. It’s about a three-to-four-hour process here at the hospital. The procedure takes 20 to 40 minutes. The outcomes are very good, and side-effects, some frequency, and urgency right after the procedure, but then if there’s a stream, you can get off of the medications for the enlarged prostate, things like that.”
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