When our urinary system works correctly, it regulates, manages and eliminates urine waste. It includes a number of moving parts, such as your kidneys, ureters, bladder, and the urethra. Regardless of age or ethnicity, men can experience urologic problems or conditions, resulting in problems eliminating or challenges with reproductive organs.

Here are the 7 most common urologic problems that plague men:

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Women who develop preeclampsia, a form of dangerously high blood pressure during pregnancy, may face a wide variety of heart problems long after they give birth, a research review concludes.

Preeclampsia has long been linked to an increased risk of events like heart attacks and strokes years later, but women often don’t experience symptoms until they have a life-threatening problem. For the current analysis, researchers examined results from 13 previously published studies that assessed women’s hearts with echocardiography to look for early warning signals.

“Previous studies had demonstrated cardiac dysfunction in women with a history of pre-eclampsia but this paper brings together the results of those studies to try and better understand the extent of the problem and the patterns of dysfunction,” said lead author Archana Thayaparan, a researcher at Western Health in Victoria, Australia.

“This is important for patients as no large studies have been done to investigate this, and most women with pre-eclampsia are unaware of the potential long-term consequences and increased risk of heart disease and stroke,” Thayaparan said by email.

So-called gestational hypertension, when women who normally don’t have high blood pressure develop it during pregnancy, is fairly common, affecting 6% to 8% of pregnant women. This condition can progress to a more serious and potentially life-threatening version of high blood pressure known as preeclampsia later in pregnancy.

Women with preeclampsia are more likely to develop “diastolic dysfunction,” which happens when the heart doesn’t fill with blood properly and is a precursor to a form of heart failure.

In the study, about 19 percent of women with a history of preeclampsia developed diastolic dysfunction, compared with 5.4% of women with uncomplicated pregnancies.

With a history of preeclampsia, about 25% of women went on to develop heart failure within 4 to 10 years of giving birth, compared with 7% of women with uncomplicated pregnancies, researchers note in the Australasian Journal of Ultrasound Medicine.

This suggests that women with a history of preeclampsia should get regular echocardiograms to monitor their hearts for changes that might not yet be causing any symptoms, the study authors conclude.

The study wasn’t designed to determine whether preeclampsia directly causes later heart problems, or if it might be an early sign of existing problems that emerge under the pressure of pregnancy on a woman’s body.

“Previous research has shown that traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as BMI and blood pressure play a central role in the development of cardiovascular disease in women who experienced preeclampsia,” said Eirin Haug, a public health researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Doctors currently advise women with a history of preeclampsia to make lifestyle changes like losing weight, exercising, and eating a heart-healthy diet and to get regular blood pressure checks, Haug said by email.

“We still lack evidence for the effect of screening and lifestyle modifications on reducing cardiovascular risk in these women,” Haug said. “More research is needed to tailor effective strategies to prevent cardiovascular disease in this group of women.”

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(Reuters Health) – People with high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol before age 40 are more likely to have a heart attack later in life than other adults, a new analysis suggests.

The analysis pooled data from six studies involving a total of 36,030 people. Starting when participants were 53 years old on average, researchers tracked them to see who had heart attacks, strokes, or heart failure.

By the time half of the people had been tracked for at least 17 years, participants who had high levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol before age 40 – that is, higher than about 129 milligrams per deciliter of blood – were 64% more likely to have had events like heart attacks compared to people with low LDL levels in early adulthood.

The upper limit of normal blood pressure is 120/80. Younger adults who had high systolic blood pressure – the “top number” – were 37% more likely to develop heart failure later in life. And young adults who had elevated diastolic blood pressure – the “bottom number” – were 21% more likely to develop heart failure later on.

“Many young adults feel OK, or they’re willing to think–I’m OK now, I will make healthful choices later when I’m older,” said Dr. Andrew Moran, senior author of the study and a researcher at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.

“This study shows that healthy choices matter even in young adults,” Moran said by email. “This means not smoking, eating a healthful diet, and exercising regularly.”

And for some high risk young adults, starting medication to manage risk factors at a younger age – something that currently isn’t done as a matter of course – may be worthwhile, Moran added.

Very few people in the study had high blood pressure or high cholesterol during young adulthood, researchers report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

During follow-up, 4,570 participants had events like heart attacks, 5,119 had heart failure events, and 2,862 had strokes.

The study can’t explain whether or how high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol in early adulthood might directly cause heart attacks, strokes or heart failure later in life.

One limitation of the analysis is that because the smaller studies used in the analysis didn’t have blood pressure and cholesterol measurements across the lifespan, in some cases researchers had to estimate how many younger adults had these risk factors based on the data they had for participants at older ages.

“Heart failure and heart attacks are the result of years of exposure to risk factors like high blood pressure and cholesterol,” said Dr. Samuel Gidding, coauthor of an editorial accompanying the study and medical director of the FH (Familial Hypercholesterolemia) Foundation in Pasadena, California.

“Both cause the buildup of fat in the coronary arteries beginning in childhood; this leads to heart attack later in life,” Gidding said by email. “High blood pressure puts extra strain on the heart and adapting to that stress leads to heart failure.”

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