>In women, breast cancer has a similar death toll, but the breasts have an excuse: they’re much bigger; there are many more cells to go bad. They’re also much more metabolically active, capable of producing enough milk to feed a baby; the prostate’s output is tiny in comparison.
Except that you make work your prostate everyday, multiple times, since your adolescence, whereas a woman doesn't breastfeed everyday since adolescence.
The text brushes over the importance of healthy muscle motion for venous blood flow against gravity. Staying physically active, including pelvic floor exercises into the routine and correct belly breathing utilizing the diaphragm are probably the best options for preventing issues with reduced venous blood flow from the testicles passing by the prostate back to the heart.
> Screening for this disorder is simple: use a thermal camera and compare testicular temperature sitting up (or standing) versus lying down, in each case waiting five minutes or so for temperatures to equilibrate, and taping the penis up so that it does not affect the measurement.
Interesting. I wonder how many how many other issues we could screen for using such simple, low cost tools. Some scales can already detect reduced blood flow in the feet (which can be a sign of all sorts of nastiness).
In February I happened to attend a lunch 'n learn presentation at TMCi by a company doing clinical trials based on exactly this venous insufficiency principle. I think I may have been the only one in the audience with gray hair... TMCi is the startup accelerator attached to the Texas Medical Center in Houston.
The startup company is Vivifi Medical[1] and they have clinical trials underway with ten men in a Central American country (El Salvador?). They claim that BPH reverses in a few months after their procedure. Their procedure uses a minimally invasive tool of their own invention to snip the vertical blood vessels that are backflowing from age and gravity, and splice them into some existing horizontal blood vessels. On their board of advisors is Dr. Billy Cohn[2], the wildly innovative heart surgeon who is famous for shopping for his medical device components at Home Depot. Dr. Cohn is on the team building the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart. Vivifi presented their estimated timeline to FDA approval, with proposed general availability in 2028. My personal BPH will be at the head of the line for this procedure.
As far as a startup, their TAM is about 500 million men. I had the Urolift procedure for BPH three years ago, and it cost about $15K on the Medicare benefits statement, though Urolift's clips amounted to only a few thousand dollars. Similarly, Vivifi's charges for this procedure are only a few thousand dollars per procedure, but it holds the promise of being a final solution. Currently Urolift is much less disruptive than TURP, which needs a couple of days in the hospital and almost always leads to retrograde ejaculation (into the bladder).
Based on the simplified sketches and reasoning I'd assume that it made more sense to sclerose the two small vein sections connecting the testicles with the prostate. Does somebody know why that's not the suggested option?
Issues like these reflects an evolutionary blind spot: selective pressure drops off after reproductive age, allowing defects like prostate dysfunction to persist. It's the same reason late-onset neurological diseases remain prevalent.
> It’s odd for there to be such an easily-removable design flaw in the human body; evolution tends to remove them.
I wouldn't say so at all. Poor eyesight carries on smartly. Baldness. I enjoy both.
But an old story about the controller code for a surface-to-air missile comes to mind.
Someone looking at the memory allocator spots an obvious resource leak: "This code is going to crash."
The reply was that, while the point was theoretically valid, it was irrelevant, since the system itself would detonate long before resource exhaustion became an issue.
So too prostate cancer back in the day: war, famine and plague were keeping the lifespan well below the threshold of every man's time bomb.
Finasteride or dutasteride. They control BPH perfectly, while also treating male pattern baldness. Combine with daily tadalafil to offset any chance of the dubious sexual side effects, while also reducing gynecomastia (it's also an aromatase inhibitor!). Make sure to have regular 5ari-aware PSA screenings to make sure high grade cancers are caught and you are golden.
fin/dut + tad are my favorite medications to keep men fresh for many more years than intended by nature.
Have your children before you start though, as dut will probably make you sterile eventually.
An end to all this prostate trouble?
(yarchive.net)218 points by bondarchuk 6 hours ago | 99 comments
Comments
Except that you make work your prostate everyday, multiple times, since your adolescence, whereas a woman doesn't breastfeed everyday since adolescence.
Interesting. I wonder how many how many other issues we could screen for using such simple, low cost tools. Some scales can already detect reduced blood flow in the feet (which can be a sign of all sorts of nastiness).
The startup company is Vivifi Medical[1] and they have clinical trials underway with ten men in a Central American country (El Salvador?). They claim that BPH reverses in a few months after their procedure. Their procedure uses a minimally invasive tool of their own invention to snip the vertical blood vessels that are backflowing from age and gravity, and splice them into some existing horizontal blood vessels. On their board of advisors is Dr. Billy Cohn[2], the wildly innovative heart surgeon who is famous for shopping for his medical device components at Home Depot. Dr. Cohn is on the team building the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart. Vivifi presented their estimated timeline to FDA approval, with proposed general availability in 2028. My personal BPH will be at the head of the line for this procedure.
As far as a startup, their TAM is about 500 million men. I had the Urolift procedure for BPH three years ago, and it cost about $15K on the Medicare benefits statement, though Urolift's clips amounted to only a few thousand dollars. Similarly, Vivifi's charges for this procedure are only a few thousand dollars per procedure, but it holds the promise of being a final solution. Currently Urolift is much less disruptive than TURP, which needs a couple of days in the hospital and almost always leads to retrograde ejaculation (into the bladder).
[1] https://www.vivifimedical.com/
[2] https://www.texasheart.org/people/william-e-cohn/
it seemed to work for me, took it for few months, 10y+ ago. "Lasted" 8-9 years.. - until recently..
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3175703/
[2] https://wjmh.org/DOIx.php?id=10.5534/wjmh.230222
I wouldn't say so at all. Poor eyesight carries on smartly. Baldness. I enjoy both.
But an old story about the controller code for a surface-to-air missile comes to mind.
Someone looking at the memory allocator spots an obvious resource leak: "This code is going to crash."
The reply was that, while the point was theoretically valid, it was irrelevant, since the system itself would detonate long before resource exhaustion became an issue.
So too prostate cancer back in the day: war, famine and plague were keeping the lifespan well below the threshold of every man's time bomb.
Finasteride or dutasteride. They control BPH perfectly, while also treating male pattern baldness. Combine with daily tadalafil to offset any chance of the dubious sexual side effects, while also reducing gynecomastia (it's also an aromatase inhibitor!). Make sure to have regular 5ari-aware PSA screenings to make sure high grade cancers are caught and you are golden.
fin/dut + tad are my favorite medications to keep men fresh for many more years than intended by nature.
Have your children before you start though, as dut will probably make you sterile eventually.