erection

There is a deep-rooted popular belief that associates the presence of morning erections exclusively to testosterone levels and the “virility” that man has. But recently it is being seen that this is something that can be an indicator of having good cardiovascular health, although logically not having them does not categorically mean that there is a disease in the heart or arteries. Its foundation. Here the scientific literature has a very important position, since, although there is a real basis to point out that the absence of these erections is an important symptom, it does not function as a ‘yes or no’, but is a continuous and complex marker. In this way, if we analyze the evidence from the most powerful population studies of recent decades, we discover that morning erections speak much less about our hormones and much more about our arteries. A thermometer of cardiovascular health. To understand why an erection matters at a systemic level, we must remember that we are dealing with a fundamentally vascular phenomenon. The arteries of the penis in this case are much narrower than the coronary arteries, and that is why, if we have a process of atherosclerosis or endothelial dysfunction that is beginning in the body, the smaller arteries will be the first to fail. This is why erectile dysfunction is a very important predictor for cardiologists and urologists to know what the inside of the arteries may be like without having to do any extra tests. Risk in escalation. A landmark study published in PLOS Medicine in 2013 continued to more than 95,000 men and showed that cardiovascular risk is increasing. In this way, it was seen that men with severe erectile dysfunction had almost double the risk of general mortality compared to those who did not suffer from it. This adds to a second study published in Circulation with almost 93,000 men which confirmed that erectile dysfunction increases the risk of total cardiovascular events by 44% and the risk of acute myocardial infarction by 62%. Testosterone. This is where popular culture collides with the data provided by scientific evidence. It is true that testosterone reaches its maximum peak in the morning and it is logical to think that this enhances the morning erections that men have, but a 2019 observational study carried out on 761 men showed that those who maintained their nocturnal erections had, on average, slightly higher total testosterone and lower libido. But testosterone does not explain the risk of suffering from serious disease in our arteries. Here the European Male Aging Study followed about 1,660 men for more than 12 years and analyzed different specific symptoms: erectile dysfunction, low libido and loss of morning erections. And here they saw that having poor erections in the morning increased the risk of mortality by 28%. It’s not testosterone. The key to this study is that, when adjusting the results based on the patients’ testosterone levels, the risk of mortality remained exactly the same. This means that it does not matter whether you have more or less testosterone, because what is truly important here is to have ‘clean’ arteries that allow blood to be carried to the penis without any type of obstacle. There is no need to obsess. We must not fall into the trap of stating that the absence of morning erections is the same as having a major underlying disease. What we must keep in mind is that we are faced with one more risk factor or symptom that is added to many others in a complex puzzle that must occur for a specific disease to occur, and that is why this is something that is left in the hands of medical specialists to determine what may be happening inside the arteries. Images | Tania Mousinho In Xataka | The strange syndrome of painful erections: there are only 66 cases in the world and science is just beginning to understand it