What is benign prostatic hyperplasia?
Benign prostatic hyperplasia is a physiological growth in all men from the age of 45 or 50, which produces certain alterations in the emptying of the bladder. Benign hyperplasia, as its name suggests, is a physiological and benign growth and must be distinguished from a growth due to prostate cancer.
What are the symptoms of benign prostatic hyperplasia?
Benign prostatic hyperplasia presents two large groups of symptoms, some are irritative and others are obstructive. The irritative ones are treated from the urological point of view with medication and it is not necessary to resort to surgery.
The obstructive symptomatology, which is the one that bothers the patient the most, may require, in case of failure of medical treatment, surgical treatment for emptying the prostate.
The most characteristic obstructive symptoms would be a decrease in the strength and caliber of the urinary stream, and as a consequence of inadequate emptying of the bladder, pollakiuria, i.e. an increase in the frequency of urination both day and night.
What treatments are available for benign prostatic hyperplasia?
For benign prostatic hyperplasia we have medical treatments and when these fail we resort to surgical techniques. Until 2003 there were two types of surgery, a transurethral endoscopic surgery, which was less invasive, and a more aggressive one, which was open surgery. Both surgeries were bleeding and had significant consequences in terms of incontinence and impotence.
Since 2003, we have been pioneers in using the green laser and we perform this surgery successfully because it is minimally invasive, so the patient is only hospitalized for 24 hours, there is practically no bleeding and the sequelae are minimal or null.
At the present time, we do not have any patient with impotence, and with incontinence only some at a temporary level that has been corrected, so we can say that there are no sequelae. Today we are in the fourth generation of lasers and we have more than 1000 patients operated with total success and with almost no complications.