Prostatitis revisited: new definitions, new approaches

Prostatitis syndromes represent an important health care problem resulting in considerable morbidity and expenditure of health care resources. Comparison of the traditional and consensus classification schemes demonstrates no changes in the traditional categories of acute bacterial prostatitis and chronic bacterial prostatitis. Examining only the EPS, however, results in diagnosis of half of the patients with inflammatory CP/CPPS. An optimal diagnostic strategy required evaluation of the VB3 and SFA in addition to the traditional EPS examination. Such precision is necessary for research studies, but whether such precision is important clinically remains unproved. The new interest in optimal evaluation and characterization of patients with chronic prostatitis and related conditions has resulted in important research initiatives examining the etiology and optimal treatment for this large group of patients.