Abstract
We studied the association of climacteric symptoms with attitudes toward sexuality and sexual function in 653 climacteric women with a mean age of 52.2±3.6 years with unidentified complaints. Patients who had "completely lost interest" or "lost more than half of interest" in the opposite sex accounted for 35.4% of the women, while those who "felt no change in interest in the opposite sex" accounted for 44.0%, and not quite half. Climacteric scale scores were significantly higher for women who had lost interest in sexual life than for those who felt no change in interest. The incidences of complete and relative dyspareunia were 5.76% (36/625) and 5.44% (34/625), respectively. When we examined the relationship between the age of women with unidentified complaints and difficulty in leading a sexual life, the mean ages of women who felt "considerable difficulty" (48.9±4.2 years; P=0.0038) and that of women who felt it "totally impossible to lead a sexual life" (49.2±6.3 years; P=0.089) were significantly lower than the mean age of women who felt no difficulty in leading a sexuallife (51.7±4.9 years). We conclude that: (1) Unidentified climacteric complaints attenuated sexuality; and (2) more than 10% of climacteric women with unidentified complaints were suffering from dyspareunia, from theearly climacteric phase. These findings indicate that, in future climacteric treatment, we should recon-sider "sex" and take a positive approach to treatment as well as make effort towards improvement of unidentified complaints associated with dyspareunia.
