I read an NIH study that said only about half of Holep patients experience improvement in urgency symptoms. This is disappointing because urgency is my biggest complaint, it’s making me miserable.
Does urgency feel different after the improvements in flow/emptying?
Can anyone comment from experience?
Are you defining urgency as the need to go “RIGHT NOW” or as “I feel like I need to go even when I don’t void much, volume-wise?” The reason I ask is that I thought I had BPH in my early 50s when it was actually bladder spasms. When I had my TURP at age 70, it not only eliminated the BPH issues, it greatly reduced the bladder spasms and allowed me to stop taking the medication I’d been on for 20 years.
Holep is pretty much a TURP but using a laser and removing more of the prostate. After the prostate and urethra recover from the trauma of surgery, I don’t know why urgency would not be eliminated unless something else is the cause.
The study used a subjective measure of urgency: participants were asked to rate their urgency on a 1-5 scale. So indeed, subjects likely had different definitions of “urgency”. One man might define it as 24/7 urge while another might define it as getting up 8 times a night to urinate. Poor study design IMO.