Sexualidad en la edad geriátrica: disfunción eréctil, sintomatología urinaria del tracto inferior y posibilidades de tratamiento

In 1901, life expectancy in Spain was 34.76 years and has gradually increased to 80.23 years in 2005. The concept, Compression of morbidity has been used to explain the fact that incapacitating diseases tend to be compressed in the last months or years of life. This may be why there are currently a large number of old people (almost 10 million over 60 years old in Spain) in our country with no incapacitating diseases and that most of them have a high Quality of Life in all aspects. From the evidence available, the majority of them are interested in maintaining their sexual activities at any age. Therefore, health professionals must be attentive to patient demands in this respect, have to be close to patients in this sphere, without considering the age of the patient is not an absolute or relative barrier in approaching this subject. Erectile Dysfunction is a highly prevalent (with more than 90,000 new cases each year) in men older than 55 years and there may be as many 2.3 million men in Spain with this condition. Many of these are not referred, nor detected, nor treated. This is a multifactorial pathology, but it has a well known treatment, with demonstrated safety and effectiveness in all ages, with more than 10 years of scientific evidence. Low Urinary Tract Symptoms is another highly prevalent condition in men, and is frequently associated with Erectile Dysfunction. It is estimated that there are now more than 1.9 million men in Spain with a combination of the two diseases,both of which highly affect the Quality of Life of the patient. During the last months, scientific evidence has been published that seems to demonstrate that Erectile Dysfunction treatment has a highly positive collateral effect on improving Low Urinary Tract Symptoms. For this reason, it is imperative that a therapeutic approach of these two problems (Erectile Dysfunction and Low Urinary Tract Symptoms) is carried out by all health professional teams who care for older patients on a multidisciplinary basis.