The New Age of Prostatitis.

Prostatitis has long been a poorly understood and poorly characterized entity. Characterized in 1980 as a "wastebasket of clinical ignorance," it has only recently begun to be studied effectively. Prostatitis represents over 2 million medical office visits per year in the United States, and is the diagnosis given to 8% of urology clinic patients. Its prevalence may be as high as 10% among the male population at large. Sufferers report a sickness impact of prostatitis that is similar to myocardial infarction or Crohn's disease. Less than 10% of cases of prostatitis are easily demonstrable to have a bacterial cause; these respond to conventional antimicrobial treatment. The etiology, pathogenesis, and optimum treatment for the remaining 90% of sufferers of this disease complex are quite unclear. Application of clinical research techniques and molecular biology promise new insight into this challenging and difficult problem.