Adolescents between the ages of 16 and 21 have high rates of sexual problems, with about 80% of sexually active adolescents reporting a sexual problem within the past two years, according to a team of Canadian and American researchers.
Most of the past research on sexual health in this age group has concentrated on infection risk and unplanned pregnancies, they said. But sexual functioning in adolescents has not been widely studied.
Their paper, published online last month as an article in press in the Journal of Adolescent Health, involved 405 adolescents in Canada (180 men with an average age of 19.3, 225 women with an average age of 18.7). Over two years, the participants completed five online surveys that addressed the following concerns:
• Overall sexual function over the previous four weeks (e.g., erectile function and premature ejaculation for men; lubrication and orgasm for women)
• Sexual distress
• Sexual self-esteem
• Sexual self-disclosure (how respondents shared their sexual likes and dislikes with their partners)
• History of sexual coercion
• Socialization (whether respondents supported traditional beliefs about men and women)
• School sex education
Among the sexually active participants, 78.6% of the men and 84.4% of the women had at least one sexual problem during the study period. For 41.7% of the men and 47.8% of the women, those problems were distressing.
For men, the most common sexual issues were low satisfaction, low desire, and erection problems.
More than half of the women said they were unable to reach orgasm. Other prominent concerns for women were low satisfaction and pain.
Adolescents who were not in a relationship were about three times more likely to report sexual problems than their partnered peers.
Sexual problems tended to improve in time for the women, possibly because of “learning and experience,” the authors noted.
“What is clear is that the early sexual lives for many start out characterized by problems in sexual functioning that might warrant clinical diagnosis as dysfunctions in the future,” they wrote.
The authors acknowledged that they did not assess the participants’ general health, so it was unclear whether medical conditions, such as diabetes, might have affected sexual health. Nor did they know much about wider issues of importance to the participants, such as school, work, and family life. Also, sexual problems were reported for the previous four weeks, as they are with adult populations. Different time periods might yield different results.
The researchers urged healthcare providers to consider sexual function when working with adolescent patients. “Healthy sexual development can be encouraged through the processes of learning, communication, and experimentation—key to discerning what is pleasurable in one’s sexual life and in one’s interactions with partners, as well as the contexts and circumstances that are most conducive to positive encounters,” they wrote.
Resources
Journal of Adolescent Health
O’Sullivan, Lucia F., et al.
“A Longitudinal Study of Problems in Sexual Functioning and Related Sexual Distress Among Middle to Late Adolescents”
(Article in Press. Published online: June 16, 2016)
http://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(16)30056-8/fulltext