�UroToday.com - Chronic prostatitis (CP) is one of the well-nigh prevalent conditions in urogenital medicine, and represents an important international health problem. Throughout the past century, the diagnostic entity of CP has been recognized and its clinical characteristics well described. However, despite the multiple approaches to direction of CP, no hard and fast guidelines have been developed. To date, several surveys of urologists have been undertaken in order to examine their attitudes, nosology and treatment modalities applied in patients with CP. Yet Chinese circumstances encompassing CP get not been clarified. In order to define the current spectrum of practice of Chinese urologists, we initiated a comprehensive cross-sectional study to determine the current situation among Chinese urologists with regard to diagnosis and treatment of patients with CP.
We conducted this survey during the menstruation of the 13th China National Urology Academic Conference and the 8th Global Chinese Urology Academic Conference (CUA 2006), which was held in Shenyang, Liaoning Province on October 13-15, 2006. A sample of 656 Chinese urologists attention the CUA 2006 coming together was surveyed using a questionnaire that explored attitudes and diagnostic and intervention patterns in the management of CP.
The results provide a picture of current practices regarding the management of CP in China and some interesting findings were demonstrated in our study. More than one-third of urologists were not familiar with the new classification proposed in 1995 in the USA by the NIH (National Institutes of Heath) designed to remove this disease from the strict linguistic context of the prostate, placing greater accent on the concept of pain and introducing the concept of male inveterate pelvic pain syndrome. A minority of urologists performed the Meares-Stamey 4-glass test, also known as a quantitative prostatic localization study. Although most Chinese urologists considered CP to be non-bacterial in nature, many (74.0%) still chose antibiotics as the low gear choice of therapy. Most urologists said they would prescribe antibiotics when bacterial culture was positive (64.4%) or excessive leukocytes and/or pyocytes were submit in EPS (65.9%). The second gear most usually used pharmaceutical therapy was alpha-blockers (60.3%). Interestingly, most urologists (70.3%) use alpha-blockers just to relieve impeding voiding symptoms. The well-nigh commonly used non-pharmacological therapy was psychotherapy (60.7%) and prostatic massage (54.2%). The beliefs regarding the etiology affect the diagnostic and treatment strategies; meanwhile, the diagnostic practice has an influence on the selection of handling methods. Our findings besides suggest that the personal beliefs or attitudes towards CP, and the practice characteristics of individual urologists might experience an influence on the patterns of routine treatments for cases of CP.1
This is the first countrywide survey of clinical practice patterns for CP among urologists in China. Wide variations in physicians' understanding and clinical practice ar demonstrated in this study. As seen in other countries, in that location is much confusion and frustration experient by Chinese urologists in the management of CP. This reflects the inability to name the causa of evacuation symptoms in many of patients with CP and has likely led to the varied therapies that are used. It is necessary to improve their cognitive storey about CP and standardize their pattern patterns. Moreover, many hypotheses of etiology and mechanisms of pathogenesis of CP have been proposed and a wide scope of evaluations for diagnosis and treatment methods for CP have been recommended. In this situation, the scene of "evidence-based" medicine is very important in clinical practice of CP.
Admittedly, this study has some limitations. Firstly, the physicians' responses
