Does heart disease mean a less active sex life?
Middle-aged adults with recently diagnosed heart disease may be less sexually active than their healthier peers, a UK study suggests.
Researchers analysed survey data from about 3,000 men and 3,700 women aged 50 and older, including 376 men and 279 women with heart disease.
Among heart disease patients diagnosed less than four years before the survey, both men and women were much less likely to report having any sex in the past year than their counterparts without heart problems.
"We cannot say for certain what the causes of these differences in sexual activity are," said lead study author Andrew Steptoe, of the British Heart Foundation and University College London.
"My suspicion is that it is a mixture of caution and nervousness on the part of patients and their partners, reinforced in some cases by medical advice to take things slowly," Steptoe said by email.
Overall, about 79 percent of men and 55 percent of women in the study said they were sexually active, according to the study online now in the journal Heart.
Men with heart disease diagnosed in the past four years were 76 percent less likely to have had sex in the past year than men without heart problems. Women...