It was announced by Italian researchers in June that their recent study has concluded that there is a link between pornography addiction and erectile dysfunction in young men. As stated by the research project’s author, University of Padua urologist Carlo Foresta, around 70% of men in their 20′s who sought clinical assistance for ED as part of the study confessed to habitual usage of online pornography. Additional data collected from the test subjects implies that this issue may be more prevalent than originally thought.
Per one of the study’s young participants, “Guys will never openly discuss this with friends or co-workers, for fear of getting laughed out of town. But when someone tells their story on a health forum, there are always at least 50 or 100 replies from other guys who struggle with the same thing.” This type of comment was prevalent from the test subjects, and coupled with further findings by Dr. Foresta and his team, they appear to indicate that ED has turned into a silent epidemic among the youth.
How Can Pornography Use Cause ED?
The assertion of the Italian research team is that regular viewing of internet pornography causes “hyper-stimulation” of young men’s erotic sensibilities and a “desensitization” of the brain’s mesolimbic dopamine pathway (in common terms, the brain’s pleasure centers). As one interviewee so candidly put it, “Lots of guys, in their 20s or so, can’t get an erection anymore with a real girl”, simply because traditional sexual situations don’t create the same degree of excitement as the explicit ones depicted in erotic videos. An especially distressing side note to this problem, was that doctors additionally discovered that young men suffering from ED were also much more likely not to use condoms when they did have intercourse.
Based on the data gathered, the episodes of erectile dysfunction in young men just about always followed periods of increasingly heavy pornography usage – both in terms of the amount and graphic nature of the material watched. This observation, in addition to the withdrawal symptoms displayed by subjects after their exposure to the material stopped (foremost among them, urgent cravings and a total loss of libido), further strengthened the hypothesis that the occurrences of impotence were connected to the pornography addiction.
How is this Kind of ED Treated?
Dr. Foresta and his researchers concluded that occurrences of impotence triggered by pornography addiction are fully reversible – but the course of action is not a quick one.
In fact, the most-successful approach to treatment requires a withdrawal period of up to several months where the patient abstains from strong sexual stimulation such as masturbation.
Invariably, however, this approach did help the test participants to get back full erectile health (typically within eight weeks), including a normal sex drive, and the ability to enjoy fulfilling intercourse with a partner. The greatest degree of success was among individuals who, when previously diagnosed by doctors, had been informed that there was “nothing wrong” with them physiologically. To sum it up, it appears as if the cure for erectile dysfunction in young men, at least in cases related to overuse of pornography, is abstinence.
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