Self-management for men with lower urinary tract symptoms

Abstract

Treatment for men with lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) has developed into a "cascade" that escalates from watchful waiting through medical treatment to surgery. Self-management can help men to adopt lifestyle and behavioral modifications that will avoid or delay an escalation in treatment and reduce symptoms. Although many of these interventions are advised to men with LUTS, it is usually in a nonstandardized and unsystematic way. Recent work in this area has defined a self-management program for men with uncomplicated LUTS using formal methods and assessed its effectiveness in a randomized controlled trial. Self-management significantly reduced the frequency of escalation through the treatment cascade and reduced urinary symptoms (as effective as medication), suggesting that self-management could be considered as first-line treatment for men with LUTS.