Hyperplasia

And the nocebo effect is also very common when a person is told the potential side effects of a real medication they're taking.

A study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in 2007 divided 120 patients with an enlarged prostate, technically known as benign prostatic hyperplasia or benign prostatic hypertrophy, BPH, into two groups.

Hyperplasia, by the way, means an increase in the number of cells, while hypertrophy means an increase in the size of individual cells.

And if you look at an enlarged prostate gland under a microscope, you see that it grows mostly by making more cells, not by the cells themselves getting bigger.

So the accurate term is hyperplasia.