An enlarged prostate gland, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), can interfere with urination, increasing frequency and urge of urinating, or cause problems emptying the bladder. Surgery and drugs are often used to try to treat BPH. However, using herbal medicines in an attempt to relieve BPH symptoms is common. Serenoa repens is an extremely popular herbal medicine for BPH. This review found that Serenoa repens was well tolerated, but was no better than placebo in improving urinary symptom scores. Nor did Serenoa repens provide noticeable relief - generally considered to be a decrease of 3 points - of urinary symptoms.
At this time there have been relatively few high quality long-term randomized studies evaluating standardized preparations of (potentially) clinically relevant doses. Given the frequent use of Serenoa repens and the relatively low quality of existing evidence, a few more well designed, randomized, placebo-controlled studies that are adequately powered, use validated symptom-scale scores, have a placebo arm and a minimum follow up of one year, are needed to confirm, or deny, our new findings.