The Effect Of Stopping Premature Ejaculation -- On the Man and His Partner |
The Effects of Premature EjaculationIn 2005 Donald Patrick and a number of colleagues conducted an observational study of men with premature ejaculation and their partners. This was published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, volume 2, issue 3, in May 2005. Unsurprisingly, men who defined themselves as having premature ejaculation reported significantly lower levels of control over ejaculation, and said that they were considerably less satisfied with sexual intercourse. It's also no surprise that they said they experienced high levels of interpersonal difficulty in their relationship and rather a lot of emotional distress. Most of the men who were rated as having PE described the severity of the condition as either moderate – that was just under half of the men concerned – or severe – that was about a third of the men. Partners of the men in both the group with PE and the non-premature ejaculation group reported similar levels of ejaculatory control and interpersonal difficulty, although in all cases the partners' ratings were lower than the men who claimed to have PE. This suggests that the condition has more impact on men than it does on their partners, which might be a reflection of the fact that sexual performance is very important to a man's self-esteem. Typical of the results was this example: 72% of men in the PE group said that their control over ejaculation was either "very poor" or "poor", while only 5% of men in the group who did not have PE said their control was "poor" or "very poor". As far as interpersonal distress was concerned, the comparative figures were 64% and 4%. And for interpersonal difficulty, they rated at 31% and 1%. To return for a moment to the subject of how a man's partner perceives PE, it's worth noting that while 72% of men said that their control was poor or very poor, only 53% of their partners agreed with these figures; in the case of personal distress, 64% of men with PE said they were considerably distressed by the condition, while only 44% of their partners had the same perception. It is unsurprising that a man's description of how much control he had over ejaculation was correlated most highly with the intravaginal ejaculatory latency time (IELT), but once again, the men's partners rated their men less severely than did the men themselves. The strongest agreement between a man and his partner about the different questions was found in response to the question about the man's control over his ejaculation - presumably because that is fairly easily identified by both the man and his partner. So what does it all mean? This was the first large study which tried to investigate the effects of premature ejaculation on men and their partners. Its importance lies especially in the fact that it was the first study to investigate many of the descriptors used in the formal definitions of PE. The most obvious conclusion was that IELT was indeed a useful measure in distinguishing between men with PE and men without the condition. Those who have it ejaculate within 1.8 minutes (this is the median value for the whole population), while those without are able to maintain intercourse for a median time of 7.3 minutes. However, it's clear that IELT alone is not an adequate definition of PE: it describes only one particular aspect of this condition. There is an implicit weighting of different factors such as the level of control, the couple's distress, any interpersonal difficulty within the relationship, and the level of satisfaction with intercourse. Each couple will apply different importance to all of these factors, so that the impact of the rapid ejaculation may well be different on different couples – hence the difficulty of using a definition based on timing alone. It's also clear that the subjective nature of this condition leads men to a perception of their ability to control their climax which may not be based in objective reality. In general, of course, the "patient reported outcomes" investigated in this study showed an inverse relationship between latency time and satisfaction (in other words, the longer the man could control his climax, the greater the couple's satisfaction with intercourse). However, some men who took part in the study had long latency time and still reported low levels of control over ejaculation, and low levels of satisfaction with intercourse. Observations such as this show how important it is to understand the whole dynamic of sex between a man and his partner, including the time for which he is able to make love. The study is probably reasonably indicative of the wider US population, although the sample of men was rather narrow in its characteristics. From our own work, we would assume that the percentage of men with premature ejaculation is much nearer 50 to 75%, and the percentage who know how to stop premature ejaculation is much lower, at least when defined on strict criteria such as IELT. When you bring levels of satisfaction into the picture, however, it's much harder to come up with a figure that tells you anything more than the average time of intercourse achievable by men who define themselves as premature ejaculators, and the same for men who do not. Furthermore, it's also obvious that it's impossible to measure the time between penetration and ejaculation in most clinical settings. This is ironic in view of the fact that most clinical trials use IELT as the main criterion for evaluating whether or not PE exists. As the authors stated in their own conclusions, further work would be necessary to determine just how valid applying these criteria as a measure of PE actually is.... [
Effects Of Premature Ejaculation ]
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