Tag: prostate cancer

In case you hadn’t noticed, men have a pretty lackadaisical attitude toward their health—an attitude that contributes to the fact that roughly one in four men in the United states will die of heart disease, and a between 70 percent and 89 percent of all sudden cardiac events occur in men! And the situation is getting worse, with women outliving men by about five years.

Sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t have to be. The reality is that half of all premature deaths are preventable—but to accomplish that, men will have to make some pretty serious changes in the way they run their lives. Unfortunately, far too many men aren’t terribly interested in modifying their behavior.

In our third and final installment we are going to discuss the simple changes to your sexual routine that can help after prostate surgery. These techniques can be used with or without the use of medications for erectile dysfunction.

One of the most important things to remember is that after prostate surgery, your husband’s subsequent sexual difficulties can originate from physical or psychological issues, or a combination of the two. Many males feel less of a man after surgery and there is a period where he may wonder if his pride and joy (his penis) is ever going to perform again.

A virtual firestorm erupted in 2011 with the publication of the US Preventive Services Task Force’s draft recommendation that healthy men should no longer receive a PSA (prostate-specific antigen) blood test to screen for prostate cancer because "the test does not save lives overall and often leads to more tests and treatments that needlessly cause pain, impotence, and incontinence," as reported in the New York Times. The final version of the USPSTF recommendation was released in May 2012. The American Urologic Association recommends that men ages 55 to 69 talk with their doctors about having a PSA test. Men who are African American or have a familial history of prostate cancer should consider being tested starting at age 40.

Prostate cancer is one of the most serious health problems in the global community. Other than skin cancer, it is the most common malignancy among American men and has touched almost every family. Recently, the rate of prostate cancer caught up to that of lung cancer among men. More than 164,000 cases of prostate cancer will be detected this year in the United States alone. About one in every nine men in the United States will develop the disease during their lifetime.