Metabolic syndrome and sexual function in postmenopausal women

Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether female sexual dysfunction (FSD) is associated with metabolic syndrome (MS) and to identify factors that contribute to FSD in postmenopausal women. Subjects and methods: This was a cross-sectional study in 111 sexually active women aged 45-65 years. We applied the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI) to evaluate the participant's sexual function and a structured questionnaire to collect demographic, socioeconomic, clinical, anthropometric, and laboratory data. Results: The prevalences of MS and FSD were 68.5% and 70.3%, respectively. After logistic regression analysis, we identified the following variables associated with FSD: married status (prevalence ratio [PR] 1.69, 95% confidence interval [95% CI] 1.16-2.47, p < 0.01), 6-10 years elapsed since menopause (PR 1.60, 95% CI 1.22-2.09, p < 0.01), occurrence of climacteric symptoms (PR 1.01, 95% CI 1.00-1.02, p = 0.03), and history of sexual abuse (PR 1.40, 95% CI 1.12-1.73, p < 0.01). Conclusion: We found a high prevalence of MS and FSD, but no association between both. Married status, time elapsed since menopause, climacteric symptoms, and history of sexual abuse emerged as factors associated with FSD on multivariate analysis. Arch Endocrinol Metab.2016;60(6):545-53

The Impact of Metabolic Syndrome and Its Components on Female Sexual Dysfunction: A Narrative Mini-Review

“…In contrast, other studies showed no relationship between MS and FSD or metabolic components, particularly obesity, especially in postmenopausal women [26,27,30,39,40,54]. …”

“…Total 35 studies met the inclusion criteria (Table 1, 2) [2,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58]. Sixteen studies were classified as case-control studies [2,28,29,32,37,38,39,41,42,44,47,49,51,52,54,57] and the rest as observational/cross-sectional studies.…”

“…The number of participants ranged from 88 to 2,270 women. Only 9 studies looked specifically at MS [2,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32]. The remaining included data about components of MS [2,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58].…”

“…Therefore MS and its components may influence and associate with the female sexual function through the chronic vascular inflammation, oxidative stress and atherosclerosis, which also can impair the genital blood flow and the oxygen supply to the female pelvis, especially in severe MS, impairing some domains of the female sexuality [8,26,70]. …”

Impact of a high visceral adiposity index on female sexual dysfunction in sexually active women? Results of a cross‐sectional study

“…Several studies showed that MeTS had only a little impact on sexual function in middle‐ to old‐aged women 12‐14 . Contrary to these reports, many studies showed an association between the MeTS and the FSD 15‐17 . Based on this, we aimed whether the VAI was a good predictor of FSD.…”