Contemporary Sexuality - August 2008 - (Page 4) Healthy Sex, Healthy Lives continued from page 1 Beverly Whipple “Personal happiness is associated with the frequency of sexual activity and orgasm — especially among women.” — Beverly Whipple medium category. Ten years later, these answers were matched with morbidity rates. The results: Men who experienced high rates of orgasm were 50 percent less likely to have died than men with low rates of orgasm. U.K. epidemiologists George Davey Smith, Stephen Frankel and John Yarnell analyzed the Caerphilly data in their 1997 paper “Sex and death: are they related? Findings from the Caerphilly cohort study,” published in the British Medical Journal. “The association between frequency of orgasm and mortality in the present study is at least — if not more — convincing on epidemiological and biological grounds than many of the associations reported in other studies and deserves further investigation to the same extent,” wrote Davey Smith. Epidemiologists often work with government officials to promote public health. If society produces advertising campaigns to encourage seat belt use and good eating, why not encourage frequent sexual intercourse and masturbation? “Intervention programmes could also be considered, perhaps based on the exciting ‘At least five times a day,’ campaign aimed at increasing fruit and vegetable consumption — although the numerical imperative may have to be adjusted,” wrote Davey Smith. “The disappointing results observed in health promotion programmes in other domains may not be seen when potentially pleasurable activities are promoted.” Two smaller studies also indicate a possible link between frequent sexual activity and longevity. A Swedish study found that 70-yearold men were more likely to reach their 75th birthday if they still had sexual intercourse. (Women were also studied, but frequency of intercourse didn’t affect their mortality.) Similar results occurred in a North Carolina study of 252 men and women over a 25-year-period: sex prolonged the lives of men, but didn’t affect female morbidity rates. After reading the 1982 North Carolina report (called “Predictors of the Longevity Difference: a Twenty-Five Year Follow-up,” by Erman Palmore, PhD), Whipple issued the following caution: “Even though causation cannot be determined from this study, it suggests a positive association between sexual intercourse and pleasure and longevity.” Prostate cancer And there’s the rub. When it comes to sexual activity and longevi- ty, researchers have a difficult time separating overall health and sexual health. In other words, Whipple and other researchers wonder whether frequent sexual activity helps make people healthier or are healthy people more sexually active? Studies involving sex and cancer avoid that ambiguity because it’s easier to isolate the variable, which is in this case, sexual activity. A pair of studies — one by Australian researchers, another by American doctors — examine the correlation between male ejaculation frequency and prostate cancer. In “Sexual factors and prostate cancer,” an August 2003 report published in BJU International, Graham Giles, PhD, MSc, and co-authors, asked more than 2,338 men in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, Australia about their sexual history. “The questionnaire focused on ejaculation irrespective of the context in which it occurred (intercourse with another, masturbation, nocturnal emissions, etc.). Men were asked their age at first ejaculation, the maximum number of ejaculations ever experienced in 24 h, and to estimate the average number of times that they had ejaculated per week in their most sexually active year in each of three decades of age,” Giles wrote. About one-half of the subjects had prostate cancer, the other half didn’t. The results? The more men ejaculated between the ages of 20-50, the less likely they were to develop prostate cancer. So why do ejaculations possibly reduce prostate cancer risk? According to a review of the study in New Scientist, “The team speculates that ejaculation prevents carcinogens building up in the gland. The prostate, together with the seminal vesicles, secretes the bulk of the fluid in semen, which is rich in substances such as potassium, zinc, fructose and citric acid.” A group of American researchers uncovered similar results in “Ejaculation Frequency and Subsequent Risk of Prostate Cancer,” published in the April 7, 2004 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. In this study, Michael F. Leitzmann, MD, and co-authors, asked older men to estimate the “average number of ejaculations they had per month during the ages of 20 to 29 years, 40 to 49 years, and during the past year.” Unsurprisingly, young men had more sex than older men, averaging 15.1 ejaculations per month in their 20s, 11.3 ejaculations per month in their 40s, 9.4 ejaculations per month in their 50s and five ejaculations per month after age 60. Eight years after compiling that data, Leitzmann followed up with the 51,529 men (mostly white professionals) to determine who had contracted prostate cancer. They found that “most categories of ejaculation frequency were unrelated to risk of total prostate cancer. www.aasect.org | August 2008 Vol. 42, No. 8 4 Contemporary Sexuality http://www.aasect.org
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.