| BPH is an expensive
disease. About 7.5 million men have BPH, with about 250,000 men needing
prostate surgery each year. All forms of treatment for BPH cost an
estimated $5 billion each year, and as the U.S. population ages, these
costs will increase.
By 2000, the number
of men over 50 will have increased by 25 percent, and we estimate that
about 9 million men will have symptoms of BPH. Untreated, prostate
enlargement can lead to urinary tract infections, urinary retention, and
in rare cases, kidney disease.
The U.S. Food and
Drug Administration has approved some drugs for the treatment of BPH,
among them finasteride
in 1992 and doxasozin in 1995. Both drugs relieve the symptoms by
taking the pressure off the urethra.
Finasteride (Proscar©)
does this by blocking hormones that make the prostate grow, and doxazosin (Cardura©)
relaxes the muscle of the prostate.
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