One of the main reasons that medications for enlarged prostate are so ineffective is that they don’t address its main cause.
So, what is the main cause of an enlarged prostate?
According to a new study in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, it’s found in your gut.
Eliminate this gut cause (which is pretty easy to do), and your enlarged prostate automatically shrinks.
Researchers conducted a two-sample Mendelian randomization analysis, using different variants of genes to identify potential cause-and-effect relationships between risk factors (in this case, gut bacteria) and health outcomes (enlarged prostate).
They sourced gut bacteria data from the MiBioGen consortium, boasting an impressive sample size of 13,266. Simultaneously, data on enlarged prostate were acquired from the FinnGen consortium’s R8 release, which covered 26,358 enlarged prostate cases and 110,070 controls.
The results were telling. Having the following three bacteria in one’s gut drastically influenced the risk of an enlarged prostate:
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1. Eisenbergiella lowered men’s risk of an enlarged prostate by 8%.
2. Ruminococcaceae lowered their risk by 12%.
3. Escherichia and shigella, on the other hand, increased their risk by 19%.
These results suggest there is a causal link between these three microbes and enlarged prostate.
When the researchers tried to determine whether the causal relationship worked the other way, with an enlarged prostate potentially causing these gut bacteria, they drew a blank. An enlarged prostate did not impact these gut microbes at all.
Escherichia and shigella come from the same bacterial family and are known for causing diarrheal diseases, urinary tract infections, respiratory illness, and other conditions. E. coli is one of its strains, so we should not be surprised that this study found it to be harmful.
Eisenbergiella and Ruminococcaceae, on the other hand, have previously been linked with producing healthy short-chain fatty acids, modulating immune responses, aiding in the digestion and absorption of nutrients, and maintaining a healthy body weight and metabolism. If they can prevent enlarged prostate as well, that is all the more reason to cultivate some in our guts.
For years, I have been teaching men to shrink their prostate. One focus has been on improving gut bacteria (which is not difficult to do).