What is it about?
Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia, referred to as BPH, is a very common change in the ageing man. Starting around the age of 50, more and more men have symptoms and bother from this process, and in it's more aggressive forms it can cause infections, bleeding, lost sleep, and even kidney failure. In new data, we tracked the significance of this disease globally from 1990 to the present, and found alarming trends: the disease is enormously common now, and as men grow healthier and live longer, it appears likely to vastly outnumber treating surgeons and place huge burdens on health care systems.
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Photo by Vlad Sargu on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Health care systems, both in the developed and developing world, can benefit from assessment of these trends and system-wide resource planning and allocation. Cost effective, effective and available treatments must be prioritized. Winning the battles against historical diseases like tuberculosis and creating a healthier ageing population has critically important consequences.
Perspectives
This research grew out of an informal discussion and my frustration in the inability to find useful data about the significance of this disease. All of us in Urology see giant amounts of BPH in our practices, and as a researcher focused on this process I had grown tired of wanting a reference for the question of "how big a deal is BPH". As we found, it's a huge deal... pun intended. Trending disease prevalence against provider numbers was scary, especially for regions such as the United States, but true throughout the globe.
Granville Lloyd
Rocky Mountain Regional VA/ University of Colorado Anschutz SOM
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The rising worldwide impact of benign prostatic hyperplasia, BJU International, November 2020, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/bju.15286.
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