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15.02.2013

Better health = more sex

The better your health, the more sex you'll have in your lifetime, according to a study published by researchers on aging at the University of Chicago in BMJ. The researchers discovered that the amount of your life that you are sexually active increases the healthier you are.

Sexually active life expectancy
The authors of the BMJ study, Stacy Tessler Lindau and Natalia Gavrilova, thought up the epidemiological term 'sexually active life expectancy': the number of years that, at a given moment, a group of individuals will probably still be sexually active.

The number of years you probably still have to live, your life expectancy, is not the same as your sexually active life expectancy. Statistics tell us that the older people are, the more likely it is that they no longer have sex. In the group of men and women aged 75-85, for example, only thirty percent still have sex.

This is largely due to deteriorating health, the researchers discovered. They base their arguments on data on six thousand adults aged between 25 and 85, gathered for the MIDUS study in the 1990s and the NSHAP study, which was done in 2005.

The researchers discovered that the men and women with very good or excellent health were at least twice as sexually active as men and women in fair or poor health.

The researchers used data from the MIDUS study to compile the figure below. An average 30-year-old man probably still has 45 years to live. And he'll be sexually active for 35 of those 45 years. He'll have to do without sex for the last ten years of his life.

In the figure below the researchers focused on the sexually active life expectancy. According to the figure, a 30-year-old man with fair or poor health can expect to have 30 years of sex. A 30-year-old man with very good or excellent health on the other hand is likely to have almost 40 more years with active sex.

Conclusion
Fortunately your health is something that you can take charge of yourself to a fair extent. It is your lifestyle that largely determines how healthy you are and your life expectancy. [N Engl J Med. 2003 Sep 11;349(11):1048-55.] You don't need a high income to live a healthy lifestyle, and you don't need to have studied to a high level either. Living longer and more healthily isn't so difficult. The links below will give you some ideas.

Source:
BMJ. 2010 Mar 9;340:c810.