What can prevalence studies tell us about female sexual difficulty and dysfunction?

Abstract

Introduction. Many recent studies have investigated the prevalence of female sexual difficulty/dysfunction. Aim. Investigate female sexual di fficulty/dysfunction using data from prevalence studies. Methods. We reviewed published prevalence studies excluding those that had not included each category of sexual difficulty (desire, arousal, orgasm, and pain), were based on convenience sampling, or had a response rate <50% or a sample size <100. Main outcome measures. For each study we used the prevalence of any sexual difficulty as the denominator and calculated the proportion of women reporting each type of difficulty. For each category of sexual difficulty we used the prevalence of that diffi..