Is there a man over the
age of 50 who hasn’t noticed a certain flattening of the golden arch of his once formidale pee stream? Yes, aging can be unkind, but now comes research from Queen Mary University in London suggesting that the shape of a man’s urine stream is good for at least one thing: predicting prostate troubles. ScienceDaily reports that the researchers found that “a simple measurement of the characteristic shape of the flow pattern could accurately predict the maximum urine flow rate; important in the diagnosis of urinary problems such as those associated with prostate enlargement.” The researchers point out that about four out of every ten men over the age of 50 (40 per cent) and three out of four men in their 70s (75 per cent) have urinary symptoms that may be caused by an enlarged prostate. So what, exactly, does a healthy urine stream look like? “The computational and experimental modelling has therefore shown us that we would expect the urine stream wavelength to be directly proportional to the flow-rate
for a fixed meatal geometry and that the ratio
can be used as a measure of meatal dilation.” Got that? Read the complete and almost incomprehensible study.ÂÂ