Quick one, and I would like actual answers rather than polite nods. A survey of men 55 and over in the States found that 41% either have had prostate cancer or know someone who has. Only 6 per cent could identify all of the symptoms. Caveat first, because I am not going to put a number in front of you without saying where it came from. It was run by a hospital system, and they did not publish how many men they asked or when. So it is a snapshot, not a study. I am using it because the gap feels right, not because the numbers are bulletproof. Here is the list they used: Difficult, frequent or urgent urination Blood in urine or semen Fatigue Lower back, hip or thigh pain Erectile dysfunction Weight loss I will go first. Fatigue and weight loss would not have been on my list sixteen years ago. I would have said the waterworks ones and stopped there, and I would have felt quite well informed doing it. Also I want to be honest here, with Prostate Cancer, by the time you recognize most of the symptoms listed, the cancer may have already spread. The safest choice is to get a regular PSA test, so you know your baseline. So, which one on that list surprised you? Put it in the comments. I want to know which of these we are collectively not carrying, because that is the one worth a post of its own. https://www.skool.com/prostate-paladin-4886/about

@Alex Beviss Your post on symptoms got me thinking about my personal experience dealing with my prostate. I'll be honest, I didn't comprehend these things were all tied to the same problem. These are the symptoms that I personally experienced. I am going to be a little vulnerable if you don't mind. No pain - If I failed to take my Flomax daily, I notice a difference. It never hurt but I noticed an increased frequency and very weak stream. When I thought I was done urinating I actually wasn't. Sometimes returning two or three times within 20 or 30 minutes from the first urge to go. Weak stream - I saw this in your symptom list. This is actually what started me asked questions 10 years ago. Erectile Disfunction - I didn't experience erectile disfunction but I feared that was next if I didn't seek treatment. I did lose it during intercourse once or twice but that was all. The fear was real. I also found I always had to urinate immediately after. At the time it was kind of comical. Now that I know I had a larger issue getting worse and worse, I don't find it funny at all. This last symptom is embarrassing to admit. I feel though it is important to share with this community and you as you continue to bring awareness. I hope this supports the cause. Nocturnal Urination and Ejaculation - I am trying to be PG here. I experienced this while fully asleep multiple times. One time urinating in my sleep scared me enough to scheduled an appointment with my primary care doctor to talk about why and how this could happen. I continued to experience these issues over the next year. At the time, I didn't know my bladder and prostate issues were the direct cause of these embarrassing moments. This is the first time I have shared it with anyone other than my wife and doctor. When I finally saw the urologist for an unrelated pain. An ultrasound showed me to have 718 mL of urine in my bladder after fully urinating two to three times in the last 20 to 30 minutes. The doctor thought I had a tumor in my bladder blocking my ability to urinate fully. A CT scan showed a large mass in/near my bladder. He scoped by bladder in the office (cystoscopy) which proved there was no tumor. I left the office that morning with a catheter. Before I left the office however, I drained that bag three times. I lost almost 5 pounds that morning.

BRCA1 and BRCA2 are known as the breast cancer genes. Dr Colin Pritchard, who has built a career studying inherited cancer risk, said this week that the name is "a branding problem". His point: men get the same genes women do. A BRCA mutation found in a mother or a sister means exactly as much for the fathers, brothers and sons in that family. It can raise prostate cancer risk and make it more aggressive when it shows up. But the label says breast cancer. So the result travels around the women in the family and stops there. I find this frustrating, and not because anybody did anything wrong. A family sits on a piece of information for years that would have sent a man for earlier screening, and the only reason it never reached him is the word on the front of it. Pritchard's instruction was simple enough to act on today: if someone in your family has a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation, get tested, and tell your male relatives. I am not a doctor, so take the medical side to yours. But the passing-it-on side is not medical. That is just a phone call. Has anyone here had cancer genetic testing come up on the women's side of the family? Did anybody think to mention it to the men?

I need to put something in front of you that cuts across things I have said in this community more than once. I have told you an enlarged prostate is not an emergency. I have told you not to let anyone rush you into an operation. I have told you the menu of options is longer than most men are shown. I stand behind every bit of that. But I read a review over the last day that makes the other half of the argument, and it would be dishonest of me to sit on it just because it is less comforting. The argument goes like this. We all talk about the prostate. The prostate is not the organ taking the damage. The bladder may be. Your bladder is a muscle. If the outlet is narrowed, that muscle spends years pushing harder than it was built to push. The authors make one point that stopped me: you can transplant a heart. You cannot transplant a bladder. A man whose bladder has given out entirely is looking at catheters for the rest of his life. They lay out five stages in the plainest words I have seen in a journal, taken from what men actually report. One. Things slow down. An annoyance. Two. Up in the night, urgency, always needing to know where the toilet is. Anxiety and exhaustion. Three. Leaking. The smell and the stains. Embarrassment. Four. Suddenly you cannot go at all. Terror. Five. The bladder stops working. Their word for it is anguish. Their case is that somewhere in the early stages there is a window where dealing with the blockage still protects that muscle, and that we do not currently have any reliable way of telling when a man is slipping past it. Now I am going to be straight with you about how much weight this can carry, because I would rather you trusted me than agreed with me. This is a proposal. The authors call it hypothesis-generating. Their staging system has never been validated, has no cut-offs, and they describe it themselves as a way of talking to patients rather than a diagnosis. There is also a figure in the paper that contradicts itself between the table and the text, which is why I am not quoting percentages at you from it.

A study came out on the seventeenth of September in JAMA Oncology. Researchers looked at more than half a million prostate biopsies done in American hospitals between 2017 and the middle of this year, and counted how many men had an MRI scan before the biopsy. 2017: fourteen in a hundred. First half of 2026: sixty-four in a hundred. That is good news and I do not want to bury it. Scanning first is better medicine. It catches more of the cancers that matter and it saves some men from a biopsy they never needed. But a third of men going for a first biopsy still are not scanned first. Here is the sentence from the researchers that I think every one of you should have: "Any man facing a biopsy should be asking whether an MRI is appropriate for him, because it changes both whether a biopsy is needed and where the needles go." Two things in one question. Whether you need it at all. And if you do, where they aim. My friend with prostate cancer had the MRI first and it told them where to place the needles to check the cancer and then a wider spread for control. I am not a doctor, and there are legitimate reasons a doctor might go straight to a biopsy. Asking does not make you difficult. It makes you a man who knows what the options are. One word on the source, because I care about this and you should too. The study is real and peer reviewed. The press release announcing it came from the hospital system that employs the researchers, and a good chunk of it is that hospital explaining how good its own service is. I have left all of that out. The numbers and the question are the useful part. So - has anyone here been offered an MRI before a biopsy? Or had one refused, and been told why? I am genuinely curious how different the answers are between the UK, the US, Australia and everywhere else you are sitting. https://www.skool.com/prostate-paladin-4886/about