Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Dysfunction in Women and Men: A Consensus Statement from the Fourth International Consultation on Sexual Medicine 2015

TLDR: These data need to be treated with caution, because there is a high level of variability across studies caused by methodologic differences in the instruments used to assess presence of sexual dysfunction, ages of sample, nature of samples, methodology used to gather the data, and cultural differences.

About: This article is published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine.The article was published on 2016-02-01 and is currently open access. It has received 305 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Female sexual dysfunction & Sexual dysfunction.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "Incidence and prevalence of sexual dysfunction in women and men: a consensus statement from the fourth international consultation onsexual medicine 2015" ?

This manuscript was designed to conduct a review of the literature to determine the incidence and prevalence of sexual dysfunction in women and men. Key older studies and most studies published after 2009 were included in the text of this article. The outcome measures were the reports in the various studies of the incidence and prevalence of sexual dysfunction among women and men. 

Q2. What are the future works in "Incidence and prevalence of sexual dysfunction in women and men: a consensus statement from the fourth international consultation onsexual medicine 2015" ?

Future research needs to build on these findings and use standardized, validated tools with clinical cutoff scores to classify dysfunction. In this way, it will be possible to use the same methodology across multiple samples, so that a more accurate representation of the incidence and prevalence of female and male sexual dysfunction can be obtained. 

Q3. What factors have played an important role in the variance in incidence rates?

Differences in socioeconomic status among studies also have probably played an important role in the variance in incidence rates. 

Q4. What is the important common theme of the studies?

The most important common theme of the studies is that the incidence of sexual dysfunctions increases with age but that sexual concern in men older than 60 and certainly older than 70 is generally less, explaining the decreasing incidence of what might be called clinically relevant ED. 

Q5. How much pain during sexual intercourse is reported in the study?

17,36 The Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behavior20 reported pain during sexual intercourse to range from 5% in Northern Europe to 22% in Southeast Asia. 

Q6. How many men reported orgasm problem analysis in their surveys?

In the epidemiology report from the 2009 International Consultation on Sexual Medicine, 16 of the 31 published prevalence datasets reported orgasm problem analysis in their surveys. 

Q7. How was the prevalence of orgasmic dysfunction in other countries?

In other studies,16,18,19,26,27,32 the prevalence of orgasmic dysfunction was much lower (11%e16%), whereas that of mild orgasmic dysfunction was remarkably high (approximately 60%) in two Nordic countries, where identical methodology was used. 

Q8. How did Lindau et al. present a higher prevalence of arousal?

The only study by Lindau et al31 presenting a relatively higher prevalence of arousal difficulties (ie, lubrication) of 41.9% was conducted in patients with diagnosed and undiagnosed diabetes.