Sexual satisfaction in healthy aging men.

Systematic information on the contributing factors to sexual satisfaction in healthy older men is lacking. The central aim of the study was to explore the predictive significance of psychological, marital, and behavioral variables and their interaction on the satisfaction of healthy married volunteers aged 45 to 74. All subjects had an extensive psychosexual and medical evaluation and completed a battery of psychological tests which included the Derogatis Sexual Functioning Inventory (DSFI), the Locke-Wallace Marital Adjustment Test (L-W) and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS). Step-wise regression analysis demonstrated that the subjects' perception of erectile difficulties, sexual information, affect, and marital adjustment had a differential correlation pattern with three measures of sexual satisfaction explaining a substantial amount of the variance. There is a need to move beyond an exclusive focus on performance to the determinants of sexual enjoyment and satisfaction in the later years.