Is too much sex really bad for my older lover's heart?
I am in my 60s and I have a lover about the same age. I meet him regularly and we sometimes have sex more than once.
My friend is worried that he might have a heart attack; he thinks that this level of activity could, at our age, be affecting our health.
I would have thought that a satisfying sex life is good for our health, but is this so?
Sex twice a day is really good for you, but it may not be so good for your partner.
Last year a study by Michigan State University came to the depressing conclusion that older men who had sex once a week or more were more likely to experience a heart attack, or other cardiovascular problems, than men who were sexually inactive.
If that is not bad enough, the research also concluded that extremely pleasurable or satisfying sex increased the risk.
The reverse was true for women.
Older women who found sex to be extremely pleasurable or satisfying had a lower risk of hypertension, which protects them from cardiovascular risk.
However, it is important to put this in context, because the study’s author added a caveat that the men in her study who reported very high levels of sexual activity may have been using medication such as Viagra, or they may have been suffering from some form of sexual compulsivity, both of which can damage cardiovascular health.
So if your partner is not taking Viagra, I would focus on a comparable study, which was carried out closer to home.
This study, reported in the British Medical Journal, was carried out in Wales.
The 2,512 male participants were aged 45 to 59 when the study began, and their sexual behaviour and frequency were tracked for 10 years.
Over the decade, 150 of the participants died, but the mortality rate in men who had two orgasms a week or more, was less than half the rate in men who had less than one a month.
Similarly, in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, which is based on data from 6,201 men and women aged 50 to 90, sexual desire and having regular sex were markers of health and wellbeing rather than risk.
One of the joys of getting older is not having to worry about contraception, but unless you have both been recently screened you should be using condoms.
The number of sexually transmitted diseases in people over 50 has doubled in the past decade, and in women cases of syphilis have risen by 500%.
Women are more vulnerable to contracting sexually transmitted infections (STIs) after the menopause because of hormonal changes, so you need to be careful.
However, men over 50 are often reluctant to use protection.
If you can’t bear the idea of condoms, you both should get a full sexual-health screen.
As long as you have a clean bill of sexual health, just relax and enjoy the lust while it lasts.
Without wishing to stomp on your buzz, twice a day is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term and, besides, worrying about whether or not so much sex is healthy carries as much, if not more, risk than the act itself.
The relationship between stress and heart attack is very clear-cut, but the potential health consequences of being over 60 and having lots of sex is less so.
- Send your queries to suzigodson@mac.com
