Yes Urology Week means checking yourself and have other people check you, in the areas where you possibly least want to be checked. But all men must, for a long and happy life.
We spoke to Dr Luke Pratside from @numan about the issues facing men…
What is Urology Week and what are the key things people should be aware of?
The week is to raise awareness of men’s health and in particular 5 diseases: benign prostate enlargement, prostate cancer, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence and testicular cancer.
Benign prostate enlargement affects men who are 50 and above. The prostate is the gland that produces semen. And in every man over time it tends to get larger. In some men when it gets larger it puts pressure on the urine tube that runs through it. You can get urinary symptoms like walking up in the middle of the night for a wee, difficulty starting a stream of urine, that kind of thing.
Prostate cancer is a very common cancer. They say the majority of men, if we all lived to 90, would have some form of prostate cancer just because of the nature of how the prostate is always growing and the increased chance for error in the cell division making a tumour. But it’s eminently treatable most of the time if caught early.
For younger men, I’d recommend they check their testicles at least once a month. If you ever find anything you find worrying I’d advise men to make a GP appointment and get it examined, The majority of the lumps on the testicles are nothing to worry about – cysts, and enlarged blood vessels – but if its testicular cancer you want to catch it early before it spreads anywhere. Usually with surgery and chemotherapy it’s very treatable.
And then erectile dysfunction is important to talk about. There’s shame about it and it can have an impact on a man’s life. You can get medication to easily treat it, sildenafil, otherwise known as Viagra, but there’s lots of other ones like Tadalafil, another main one which we sell at Numan.
But it can be a sign of something underlying, like high cholesterol or diabetes.
It’s always worth getting these things checked out and something like Urology Week helps men feel they can raise the issues.
#urologyweek
Posted: 24/09/2020
