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Erectile dysfunction in a cohort of HIV-infected male patients

Background

The advent of antiretroviral therapy has transformed HIV infection into a manageable chronic disease, where improving the quality of life of HIV-infected patients has become one of the main focus points for physicians. The aim of our study was to evaluate the prevalence of erectile dysfunction and testosterone deficiency in a cohort of HIV-infected patients monitored in the National Institute for Infectious Diseases "Prof. Dr. Matei Balş" Bucharest, from May 2014 to June 2014.

Methods

We evaluated a cohort of HIV-infected male patients. They completed a questionnaire to evaluate erectile dysfunction, based on the International Index of Erectile Function – IIEF (maximum score 30 for questions 1,2,3,4,5,15). Total testosterone was dosed in a subset of patients reporting erectile dysfunction (mild and moderate or severe) considering normal values >10 nmol/L. Five patients refused the test.

Results

42 patients completed the questionnaire; they had ages between 23 and 69 years (mean age 36.8), 38 of them (90.4%) receiving antiretroviral therapy. 15 patients had a degree of erectile dysfunction (35.7% of total) and 2 patients had had no sexual activity in the last month: 12 patients had mild erectile dysfunction (score between 19-24), 2 patients had mild to moderate erectile dysfunction (score between 13-18), 1 patient had moderate erectile dysfunction (score between 7-12). Total testosterone was tested for 3 patients, 5 refused the test; all tests revealed normal values (>20 nmol/L).

Conclusion

This study showed that erectile dysfunction is highly prevalent, 35.7% of HIV-infected male patients have reported erectile problems.

Acknowledgement

This paper is supported by Sectoral Operational Programme Human Resources Development (SOPHRD), financed from the European Social Fund and by the Romanian Government under the contract number POSDRU/159/1.5/S/137390.

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Correspondence to Narcis Chirca.

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This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Chirca, N., Streinu-Cercel, A., Jinga, V. et al. Erectile dysfunction in a cohort of HIV-infected male patients. BMC Infect Dis 14 (Suppl 7), P31 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-S7-P31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2334-14-S7-P31

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