Endocrine Abstracts

Background: Erectile dysfunction (ED) is the most frequent sexual disorder. Although psychological ED (pED) is the most frequent form, vascular ED (vED) is associated with 1.25 times greater risk of developing major cardiovascular diseases. Alongside cardiovascular aspect, the evaluation of patients’ health, measured by the comorbidities number, in relation to the ED aetiology has never been investigated so far.

Objectives: To explore the potential relationship between the comorbidities number and ED aetiology and severity.

Methods: An interim analysis of all andrological patients attending to the Andrology Unit of Modena (Italy) from 2008 to 2011 was performed. For each patient, anamnesis, physical examination, ED characteristics, hormonal data and ongoing therapies were collected. Patients were grouped according to the ED aetiology. ED was graded using the International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF)-15 score and the number of comorbidities with Chronic Disease Score (CDS).

Results: 460 ED patients (mean age 53.7+12.4 years) were followed for 10.2+6.5 years. 357 patients (77.6%) showed pED, 75 (16.3%) vED, 20 (4.3%) hormonal and 8 (1.7%) neurological ED. As expected, CDS significantly increased during follow-up with the highest score collected at the last visit compared to baseline (P < 0.001). CDS was significantly different among ED groups (P < 0.001) with lower scores in pED compared to vED. However, CDS was not related to IIEF-15 results (P = 0.083) but only to age (P < 0.001). At logistic regression analysis, CDS was not able to predict ED diagnosis (P = 0.126).

Conclusions: We demonstrated that vED patients show an increased comorbidities number compared to other ED etiolologies, confirming the suggested vED role as a mirror of general health. The CDS inability to predict ED etiology and its absent correlation with ED severity could be masked by the limited number of patients enrolled and it could be instead highlighted increasing the sample size.