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Print This PageAn inconvenient trend in men’s health
/ Wednesday, August 29, 2012
You know those TV ads you see during ball games that advise men to seek emergency treatment for erections lasting longer than four hours? Now a new study by a Northwestern University professor shows that more men than previously thought are doing just that.
The frequency of U.S. emergency room visits for “priapism” — an erection that won’t go away — was thought to be around .34 to 1.5 cases per 100,000 men. But Dr. Andrew Flum and his colleagues looked at visits from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample and the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, and came up with a figure slightly above 8 per 100,000 men. They put the cost of treating these episodes at about $110 million a year.
“Unfortunately we don’t have a reliable way to tell if each encounter is a separate person or if one person presents multiple times,” Flum said at a poster session of the World Meeting on Sexual Medicine, as reported by MedPage Today.
Sickle cell anemia has long been a cause of priapism. But this study found that the rise in cases did not correlate to any increase in sickle cell-related incidents. They did find that the number of cases is higher in the South, whatever that means. And there was some suggestion that the growth of the problem may be related to injection therapy for erectile dysfunction. One doctor at the conference said that while this method has been around for years, its popularity has increased — and men may not be following instructions correctly.
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