Study Ties Incidences of ED in Young Men to Viewing Pornography
A study connecting erectile dysfunction in young men to pornography addiction was released by Italian researchers earlier this year. As stated by the study’s author, University of Padua urologist Carlo Foresta, roughly 70-percent of men in their 20’s who requested medical assistance for ED as part of the study admitted to regular usage of online pornography. Additional information collected from the test subjects suggests that this issue may be far more common than originally thought.
According to one of the study’s young participants, “Guys will never openly discuss this with friends or co-workers, for fear of getting laughed out of town. But when someone tells their story on a health forum, there are always at least 50 or 100 replies from other guys who struggle with the same thing.” These types of statements were prevalent from the subjects, and along with additional discoveries by Dr. Foresta and his group, they seem to indicate that ED has become a silent epidemic among the youth.
How Can Pornography Use Lead to ED?
The assertion of the Italian research team is that excessive use of online pornography leads to “hyper-stimulation” of younger men’s sexual sensibilities and a “desensitization” of the brain’s mesolimbic dopamine pathway (in common terms, the brain’s pleasure centers). As one man so candidly put it, “Lots of guys, in their 20s or so, can’t get an erection anymore with a real girl”, because ordinary sexual encounters fail to produce the same degree of arousal as the graphic ones portrayed in erotic movies. An especially troubling side note to this issue, was that researchers additionally identified that young men suffering from ED were also significantly more likely not to use condoms when they did have intercourse.
Findings from the research study conclusively showed that the instances of erectile dysfunction in young men were virtually always preceded by stretches of increasingly intense pornography use – in terms of both the amount and graphic nature of the material viewed. This basic fact, in addition to the withdrawal indicators displayed by patients after their exposure to the material terminated (chief among them, urgent cravings and a total loss of libido), further strengthened the hypothesis that the cases of impotence were connected to the pornography use.
Can This Type of ED Be Treated??
It was decided by Dr. Foresta’s group that occurrences of impotence caused by pornography addiction are completely reversible – but the process is not quick.
Indeed, the most-reliable road to treatment demands a withdrawal period of one to three months through which the patient abstains from intense sexual stimulation including masturbation.
Consistently, however, this technique did help the test participants to regain complete erectile health (usually within two months), including a normal sex drive, and the capability of enjoying mutually-satisfying intercourse with a partner. The highest level of success was among patients who, when previously diagnosed by doctors, had been informed that there was “nothing wrong” with them physiologically. In summary, it seems as if the cure for erectile dysfunction in young men, at least in occurrences related to overuse of pornography, is abstinence.
Darin Mendanor is an authority on and for its treatment. Stop by his site www.erectile-dysfunction-symptoms.net for a wealth of useful information on the subject.
