EULAR 2019: Let’s talk about sex in a rheumatology

Today I had the pleasure of presenting my first results from my project. I am part of a big group of health care providers interested in helping patients with rheumatic diseases achieve their dream of becoming mothers and fathers. There is a lot of information about the effect of rheumatic diseases on pregnancy from the female perspective but not a lot about males. Our initial objective was to understand how big of a problem this is and how we can help other health care providers. We designed a state of the art systematic review with te objetivé of summarizing the best available information over the effect of rheumatic diseases on male sexual health. Our first real finding was that this is a neglected topic in Rheumatology and Andrology. There are few studies and overall their quality was low to moderate. Nonetheless, we found that sexual dysfunction can be a very common problem in men with RA, SLE, AS and SSc. Also, these patients get secu dysfunction earlier than the general population. More importantly, these problem is often undiagnosed and patients really want to discuss this topic with their health care providers. We conclude that sexual dysfunction and rheumatic diseases are…