SA Medical - General Medicine And Imaging of Disease

A plethora of terms have been coined to describe the symptom complex traditionally associated with prostatic obstruction due to BPH.  The classic prostatic symptoms of hesitancy, poor flow, frequency, urgency, nocturia, and terminal dribbling have, in the past, been termed prostatism or simply BPH symptoms. One sometimes hears these symptoms being described as due to BPO (benign prostatic obstruction) or BPE (benign prostatic enlargement) or, more recently, LUTS/BPH. However, these classic symptoms of prostatic disease bear little relationship to prostate size, urinary flow rate, residual urine volume or indeed uro-dynamic evidence of bladder outlet obstruction.  Furthermore, age-matched men and women have similar prostate symptom scores, but women obviously have no prostate. We therefore no longer use the expression prostatism to describe the symptom complex of hesitancy, poor flow, etc. Instead we call such symptoms lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) which is purely a de