Aquablation for BPH
Don't let your prostate get in the way of your life
Make an Appointment
Haymarket/Manassas:
Culpeper:
If you’re getting up to urinate throughout the night, you could have benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), an enlarged prostate that puts pressure on your urethra and causes the bladder to overwork. But you don’t have to suffer. At UVA Health, we offer aquablation, an advanced technology that offers lasting relief.
Why Get BPH Treated?
Many men experience frequent urination, sleeplessness, and have trouble peeing due to BPH. But most don’t seek treatment. The problem? As you age, BPH gets worse. It can lead to bladder damage. You can find yourself needing to use a catheter to empty your bladder.
Aquablation provides a safe, effective, and permanent solution. It can restore your urinary continence and sexual health and preserve your confidence and overall health for years to come.
Aquablation at UVA Health
At UVA Health, we were the first to offer the latest version of this technology in Virginia. Here, you’ll experience care from specialists who helped further the original research that developed this technology.
Everyone’s prostate is different. At UVA Health, we’ll optimize your experience with personalized care and high-tech tools. We’ll tailor your treatment to work for the specific size and shape of your prostate.
Diagnosis Through Data Analysis
If you’re having any of the symptoms of BPH, you should find out why. You want to make sure you don’t have prostate cancer. And the sooner you get diagnosed, the more options we have for treatment.
To get an accurate diagnosis of your condition, we need to know:
- The pattern, strength, frequency of your urination
- How much your bladder can hold and how effectively it empties
- The size and shape of your prostate
- How much urethra is blocked and the bladder is damaged
Step 1: Measuring Your Flow
In the past, urologists had to rely on patients to keep logs of their urination. You would have to come into the office with a full bladder for analysis. These methods often had mixed results.
Now we send you home with a flow device. This is a hand-held device that empties into your toilet. It uploads data about your urine stream to our secure server in real time. With this information, we can identify the best next steps for you with a high level of precision.
Step 2: Mapping Your Prostate
The next step in understanding your condition requires a visual snapshot of your prostate and bladder.
If you have a recent MRI, we can use that. Otherwise, a 2-minute ultrasound can provide what we need.
We also do a cystoscopy. With a small, flexible scope, we can see how much your enlarged prostate has damaged your bladder and how much blockage is present.
With all of this data in hand, we work with you to personalize your treatment plan.
Aquablation: An Innovative Treatment for BPH
Gregg Eure, MD: BPH stands for benign prostatic hyperplasia. Very common condition, one of the most common we as urologists see. And what it means, really, is enlarged prostate. It's not cancer, it's a overgrowth of the prostate. Happens in about half of men and about half of them get symptoms.
So the symptoms of BPH are the classic ones are getting up at night, hard time getting started to to void, stream stop/start, got to go, got to hurry up and get there. Those are the things that bring patients in the most often.
Andrew Chung, MD: We work together to with our clinic staff to provide a full plan of treatment starting with medications usually and lifestyle changes, and then heading to the operating room if required with our OR staff. Aquablation is really the next generation of benign prosthetic hyperlasia treatments.
Eure: It's basically uses a high-pressure water jet to unblock the prostate to remove that tissue to allow the flow of urine more freely and and more efficiently.
Dana Rice, MD: As far as surgery goes versus medication, it's a very personal decision. The main sort of selling point or reason why I choose this procedure for a lot of my patients is that many of the other surgeries that we have for BPH or benign prostate disease can cause retrograde ejaculation. The data for aquablation shows that people don't lose that function with this procedure and sexual satisfaction is high on most people's priority list.
Some people have side effects with the medication and they would prefer to just have the surgery done up front. Other people have failed medication and want a little bit extra. And then as far as candidates for surgery, it's sort of all the things you would expect.
Chung: There's been a big push in our national organization which is the American Neurological Association to get patients treated earlier and I think this is important for what we term bladder health. Your prostate obstructs you and so your bladder has to push harder to get urine past the prostate. Once it does so for a long period of time, it develops more muscle to do that and that creates a thicker bladder. Once that bladder wall thickens, we can't do anything to change that anymore. And then you have permanent urinary frequency. So we like to try to get to people before any type of permanent damage is done.
Rice: So after the procedure, most people tell me that their urinary stream is significantly better. That's the goal of the procedure. I think a lot of men don't realize how weak their urinary stream is until after they've had the procedure.
Eure: So very exciting to introduce aquablation to UVA Health.
Chung: So I think the availability of aquablation in multiple locations is important so patients can get treated closer to home.
What Is Aquablation?
This technique uses a high-pressure water jet to remove prostate tissue getting in the way of your urine flow. With advanced robotics, AI, and real-time imaging, we can customize the procedure to ensure we’re removing the correct parts of the prostate and saving the rest.
Safe & Effective
This is an outpatient, same-day procedure that takes about an hour. It’s a noninvasive procedure. There’s no cutting, sutures, or lasers. You’ll have a shorter recovery time and less risk than you would with other types of surgeries.
Healing & Recovery After Aquablation
You’ll have a catheter for 2-4 days.
A catheter is a hollow tube that empties your bladder through your urethra. It gives your body a chance to heal from the procedure. Most men find this more of an inconvenience than painful.
You can come into the clinic to take it out, or we can show you how to take it out yourself. Our support team will help you either way.
After the procedure, you won’t need heavy medications. But we do urge you to give yourself time to heal. If you strain yourself during recovery, you could experience bleeding.
Most men find they’re back to physical activities after 3-4 weeks.
How Aquablation Makes a Real Impact
David's enlarged prostate kept him from sleeping. Aquablation helped him get the rest he needed, so that he could fully enjoy life.
Watch David's Story NowDavid Bogozi:
I am a retired firefighter. I live in Locust Grove, Virginia. I worked in the city of Alexandria for 33 years. I live here with my wife and we have 10 grandkids that we chase all over the place. I miss running the calls. I miss the guys in the firehouse. They were like a second family,
Gregg Eure, MD:
BPH, very common disease that we see in urology. So it stands for benign prostatic hyperplasia. And it’s really just a fancy term for enlarged prostate. So of us men, about half of us are prostate enlarges as we age. And about half of those get symptoms. So it's a good chunk of the population.
David Bogozi:
I’ve been in fairly good shape. And then BPH, you know, it was to the point that sleep was not that common because I was getting up to go to the bathroom several times a night.
Gregg Eure, MD:
As a urologist treating BPH now, we really have a lot of cutting-edge high-tech devices to help diagnose this and we really try to personalize the care to the individual case.
Gregg Eure, MD:
He explained the different options that he could offer me. One was the Aquablation, and there was the laser surgery that he talked about. And he gave me the pros and cons of both. And I liked everything that he talked about with the Aquablation surgery. He said it was the least invasive of the two procedures when he explained about the Aquablation and how effective if it could be and it didn't affect my sex life. Well that's the one that I would like to have. When can we do it?
Gregg Eure, MD:
At UVA Health at Culpeper, we’re very fortunate to get the Aquablation technology. In fact, we were the first in the state to have this newer version that uses artificial intelligence and more advanced imaging. So it really enhances the treatment.
David Bogozi:
I've been to doctors at both UVA Culpeper and UVA in Charlottesville. And the care has been great. People have been fantastic, friendly, compassionate. Oh yeah, sleep has been awesome. You know, I went from four, getting up four or five times a night to maybe twice a night. Now, if you would have the opportunity to have the Aquablation surgery over anything else, I highly recommend the Aquablation surgery. Great results in a lot of different ways. A great improvement in the quality of my life and quality of our lives.