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Symptoms
In its early stages, prostate cancer usually causes no symptoms. As the prostate enlarges, however, a man may experience difficulty in beginning to urinate, nocturia (needing to get up during the night to urinate), and urinary urgency and frequency—symptoms indistinguishable from those of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), except that they may appear more abruptly when due to cancer. The onset of erectile dysfunction or a decrease in the firmness of erections may occur when the cancer invades the nerves that control erections. In some men, the first symptoms of prostate cancer result from its spread to distant sites—for example, severe back pain from cancer that has spread to the spine.
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