Symptoms of prostate cancer

As mentioned above, most patients with prostate cancer have no symptoms at all. However, in a minority of people, prostate cancer can present with a group of symptoms known as lower urinary tract symptoms and include:

• Feeling that your bladder is not completely empty when going to the bathroom.
• Frequently you need to go to the bathroom, only to find that your bladder only contains a few drops of urine. This is called frequency.
• Severe urge to go to the bathroom that you feel you can no longer hold your urine in.
• Lower abdominal pain or distension

Lower urinary tract symptoms are general ones, and can be found in other conditions including infections, urinary stones, and benign enlargement of the prostate. Other than lower urinary tract symptoms, other symptoms include:

• Blood in urine: Blood in urine should be taken seriously regardless of whether there is pain in it or not. It can occur in other conditions like infections and bladder cancer or even benign prostatic enlargement.
• Loss of weight: Recent loss of weight is a red flag in males above the age of 50 as it can signal the presence of cancer regardless of its type.
• Back pain: Back pain is one of the symptoms that the cancer has spread elsewhere outside the prostate. One of the commonest sites of such spread is your spine, especially the lower part.