[Aging and urology: is impotence the first symptom of aging?]

The clinical expression of ageing involves several organs with variable degrees of precociousness or intensity based on the apparatus or system. An early event in the ageing process may be the occurrence of asymptomatic, and difficult to recognise, periurethral hyperplastic nodules. On the contrary, such an obvious symptom and clinical entity as erectile dysfunction may become a highly relevant herald of ageing. And this will be more so if it appears in coincidence with widespread cardiovascular disease, specially if manifest through hypertension and ischaemic heart disease. The action of the urologist faced with a patient who asks for help for his erectile dysfunction cannot be limited to the evaluation of a simple organ disease.