Domino Effect

Posted by Liz on Aug 15, 2008 in sexual health | 1 comment

I’ve been writing about sex alot lately. Sexual dysfunction, sexual desire, sexsexsexsexsex. If you were Freud, you’d have a field day!

Seriously though, a new research study in an advanced publication of the journal Menopause suggests a strong link between symptoms of vaginal atrophy (thinning of the vaginal and vulvovaginal tissues due to declining estrogen levels) and sexual dysfunction. Sort of a domino effect, if you will.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina examined 1,480 sexually active postmenopausal women, 57% of whom had symptoms of vaginal atrophy. They then asked the women about their sexual experiences; more than half (55%) also had symptoms of sexual dysfunction. In fact, the study findings revealed that women with sexual complaints had almost 4 times the risk for vaginal atrophy.

These study findings suggest a strong overlap in these conditions. This implies that if you treat symptoms of one condition, you may be able to relieve symptoms of the other. The challenge will be to find a natural and effective treatment rather than rely on the old standby – estrogen or the novel standby – SERMS.

I am going to continue to explore this topic until I find a reasonable non-pharmaceutical or estrogen-based alternative for this problem. So far, I’ve not stumbled across anything that has some good research behind it. If you know of an alternative, do drop me a line.