Study reveals that men who are more sexually active have lower death rate

Jet, Jan 12, 1998

Men who have sex frequently are less likely to die young, a recent study found.

During a decade of follow-up, researchers found that men who had sex less than once a month had twice the death rate of men who had sex at least twice a week.

The authors of the research, which was published in the British Medical Journal, studied 918 men from a pool of 2,512 men aged 45-59 years old. The men lived in or near Caerphilly, Wales.

The men were divided into three groups: those who had sex twice or more a week, an intermediate group and those who reported having sex less than monthly. A decade later, researchers said that the death rate among the least sexually active men was twice as high as the most active. The death rate in the intermediate group was 1.6 times greater.

"The association between frequency of orgasm and mortality in the present study is at least--if not more--convincing on epidemiological and biological grounds than many of the associations reported in other studies and deserves further investigation to the same extent," wrote George Davey Smith and Stephen Frankel.

The researchers said in the study that they tried to account for differences in age, social class, smoking and general health.