As speaker after speaker lauded and toasted him at his retirement banquet, Frank's eyes developed a vacant stare. Overcome with nostalgia, thought a tablemate.
Not quite. The only thing on Frank's mind was "When's this gonna be over? I gotta pee!"
Meet the prostate, the gland that helps men make babies, and after 50, helps them to act like one.
That night, just like millions of other men, Frank will get up and visit the bathroom three or four times. After a couple of nasty toe-stubbing incidents, his wife bought him a night light, though she was considerate enough not to choose one with a plastic replica of Mighty Mouse. Still, poor Frank hasn't had a really good night's sleep in 10 years.
The trouble is that, as a man ages, the prostate often swells up. Unfortunately, the prostate is wrapped around the urethra, the tube that carries urine. The fire hose of youth now performs like it's trapped under the wheels of the fire truck. Voiding is slow, incomplete, sometimes even painful. The residual urine may create an urgency to "go" with precious little warning.
All this aggravation and discomfort sends men to Urologists in droves, where most will be diagnosed with benign prostatic hypertrophy (BPH), which means their prostates are overgrown - but not because of cancer. The doctor, of course, will try to rule out any more serious causes of the problem, but if common BPH is found, there is surgery, the relatively new drug, finasteride, or in less serious cases, learning to live with it.
ANOTHER OPTION
But there is another alternative these days an herbal formulation made from a plant called Saw Palmetto. Growing wild in the American Southeast, and long used as a folk remedy there, it's now cultivated and the berries shipped to Europe.
There, the berries are processed by pharmaceutical firms into a standardized product with guaranteed potency. European men take it in droves. Many doctors there prescribe it.
The German "Commission E", which evaluates natural therapeutic agents, has given it's blessing to Saw Palmetto. The United States has nothing comparable to Germany's "Commission E". As far as our Food and Drug Administration is concerned, the lack of American research with the herb makes it ineligible for any kind of approval.
In Europe, though, there's been lots of research, much of it carried out in a very careful manner.
One of the earliest studies, by a French group, looked at the effect of Saw Palmetto extract on 94 men with the usual BPH symptoms. Actually, only half got the herb; the others received a look-alike placebo to rule out the power of suggestion.
After a month, the doctors interviewed and evaluated the men, without being aware of what group they were in the herb or the placebo.
What they found was that the herb- takers reduced the number of times they had to get up at night by nearly half; increased their flow rate by the same amount; and lessened residual urine by 42 percent.
The placebo group fared much worse; their residue, for instance, actually increased by 9 percent (British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, volume 18, 1984).
An Italian study published in Urologia in 1988 found much the same. With Saw Palmetto (which they refer to by its Latin name, Serenoa Repens), nighttime bathroom visits decreased from an average of just over 4 per night to 1.5 after three months. The placebo group saw no improvement.
Prevention herbal advisor, Varro Tyler, Ph.D, reports that good studies on 2000 BPH patients in Germany confirm the effectiveness of Saw Palmetto extract.
If you're wondering how a berry can be so good for the prostate, scientists have a pretty good idea of how it works.
What triggers prostate growth is a kind of mutated form of the male hormone Testosterone. It's called DHT (for dihydrotestosterone), and when it gets to an older man's prostate cells, it makes them think they're going through puberty again, and the gland begins packing on the beef.
As to where this troublemaker comes from well, from an instigator enzyme called 5-alpha reductase, which causes normal Testosterone to switch into hopped-up DHT.
Saw Palmetto seems literally designed to tackle this mess because what it does is:
1. Deactivates the instigator enzyme
2. Prevents DHT from acting on the prostate cells, and
3. Serves as a mild anti-inflammatory on the troubled prostate gland.
The basic mechanism here turns out to be the same as in the prescription drug finasteride. Pretty good for a dumb plant, huh?
- with Michele Stanten, Research Associate