If you need to get up to pee more regularly in the night (known as nocturia), that may have nothing to do with your prostate: 

• As you get older, your kidneys aren’t as responsive to the hormones telling them to slow urine production at night.
• Fluid that can accumulate in your legs during the day due to gravity is reabsorbed into your bloodstream when you lie down and returns into your circulation. The kidneys then process it, producing more urine.

When should I seek help for my prostate?

Prostate glands naturally keep growing during a man’s life. If your prostate gland grows in an unusual shape, it can kink your urine pipe, a bit like a kink in a hose pipe. This means you’ll have a slower flow even if your bladder is still generating a good pressure.

• For many men, taking a little longer to pee, and even experiencing a little dribble after you have peed, is not a problem.
• But if your bladder keeps having to work harder and harder to get the pee past the kink, that causes a pressure build up, a thickened bladder muscle and the symptom of urgency.
• With a thickened bladder muscle, there may not be enough nerve signals from the brain to make your bladder muscles relax as your bladder is filling. This also happens after an event such as a stroke, and the bladder muscles may become overactive.
• This is when you start experiencing problems with urinary frequency and urgency symptoms.

Sometimes, although the prostate is causing the problem, it’s the bladder that is giving you urinary symptoms. That’s why it may be wrong to be given drugs to relax your bladder when it’s really your prostate that needs to be treated.

At BPS, our specialist urologists can help you understand what’s really going on and get the right treatment.