Falling levels of sexual satisfaction in middle age, and rising incidence of erectile dysfunction, could be risk factors for age-related memory decline and ultimately for dementia in men, according to a new scientific research.
The findings, sure to produce a few headlines, come as other scientists report further evidence that poor diets are putting older people at risk of memory loss and dementia.
In the study about sexual satisfaction, researchers at San Diego State University, Penna State, the University of California San Diego and Boston University tracked more than 800 men aged 56 to 68 over a 12-year period.
Their conclusion: that those who reported declining satisfaction with their sex lives over the 12-year period also performed worse on average in a variety of standardized memory tests. Those for whom erectile dysfunction was more common also tended to perform worse on memory tests, as did those who saw their incidence of ED increase over the course of the study.
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What they don’t yet know is whether declining sexual satisfaction is causing the memory decline, vice versa, or whether the two are happening at the same time. The researchers point out that there are multiple ways in which the two could be connected.
