The Heart Does not Affect Sexual Satisfaction in Women

Women experience lack of sexual satisfaction for various reasons: sex placed at the very bottom of their priorities list; lack of emotional implication; complexes about how they look; timidity or some drugs and antidepressants. But do not add the cardiovascular disease to this list, as signaled by a new study published in the The American Journal of Medicine.

The team from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston Medical Center (BMC) and other American centers have not found any connection between low sexual satisfaction in postmenopausal women and vascular issues. Female sexual dysfunction is a widespread condition largely connected to medical issues linked to cardiovascular disease. Male cardiovascular disease is well known to cause erectile dysfunction (impotence).

This research employed information from the Women's Health Initiative Observational Study. The research poll was made of sexually active postmenopausal women aged 50 to 79 years followed for 8-12 years. A questionnaire established whether the participants were sexually satisfied or dissatisfied.

Cardiovascular disease (comprising conditions like acute myocardial infarction, stroke, coronary disease, congestive heart failure, peripheral arterial disease and angina) was determined at the beginning of the research and monitored along the study.

A low connection was established between sexual dissatisfaction and peripheral arterial disease or angina, but no connection was found between sexual dissatisfaction and any other type of cardiovascular disease, even heart attack or stroke. The researchers also did not find a connection between sexual dissatisfaction and the emergence of any cardiovascular issue during the follow-up period.

"In men, erectile dysfunction is a manifestation of cardiovascular disease, and can predict the development of adverse cardiovascular outcomes such as heart attack. In our study, we used decreased sexual satisfaction as a proxy measure for sexual dysfunction, and controlled for lifestyle issues and other factors that might impact sexual satisfaction. We did not find that sexual satisfaction predicted cardiovascular disease in the future. Our study of sexually active postmenopausal women found dissatisfaction with sexual activity was not predictive of incident cardiovascular disease which may be due to physiological differences in sexual functioning between men and women, or to difficulty measuring sexual dysfunction in women," said lead author Dr. Jennifer McCall-Hosenfeld, from in the Department of General Internal Medicine at BMC and Women's Health at BUSM.