A SURVEY CONCERNING THE ATTITUDES OF UROLOGISTS TOWARD PROSTATISM PATIENTS

In a questionnaire all urological units in Norway were asked about: 1. The examinations they routinely used for prostatism patients before d eciding upon treatment. 2. How they would score different objective an d subjective information about these patients on a scale from 0 to 10. 3. How the physicians classified different prostatism symptoms into c ategories of weak, moderate and severe. The results were: Urinary rete ntion occurring more than once or residual urine greater than 500 ml w as considered an absolute indication for surgery. Agreement about indi cations for surgery was good for information which received a high med ian score, but was much poorer for information which received a lower median score. Agreement on how to classify different symptoms into cat egories according to severity was not good. Using the median classific ation of symptoms it was estimated that urologists believe that 0.1-5. 8% of men over 60 years of age have severe symptoms, 2.1-36.4% have mo derate symptoms and 57.8-97.8% weak or no symptoms.