posted on 2023-08-30, 16:43authored byDamiano Pizzol, Jacopo Demurtas, Brendon Stubbs, Pinar Soysal, Corina Mason, Ahmet T. Isik, Marco Solmi, Lee Smith, Nicola Veronese
Globally, there is increasing usage and legalization of cannabis. In addition to its reported thera-peutic effects, cannabis has several health risks which are not clearly defined. Erectile dysfunction (ED) is the most common male sexual disorder and there are plausible mechanisms linking canna-bis use to ED. No attempt has been made to collate the literature on this topic. The aim of this re-view was to summarize the prevalence and risk of ED in cannabis users compared to controls.
A systematic review of major databases from inception to 16/01/2019, without language re-striction, was undertaken to identify studies investigating cannabis use and presence of ED. The analysis compared the prevalence of ED in cannabis users versus controls. Consequently was cal-culated the odds ratio (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), applying a random-effect model.
Were included five case-control studies with data from 3,395 healthy men, 1,035 using cannabis (smoking) and 2,360 non-users. The overall prevalence of ED in cannabis users was 69.1% (95% CI: 38.0-89.1), whilst the correspondent figure in controls was 34.7% (95% CI: 20.3-52.7). The odds of ED in cannabis users was almost four times that of controls (OR=3.83; 95%CI: 1.30-11.28; p=0.02), even if characterized by high heterogeneity (I2=90%) and the prediction intervals overlapped 1.00 (95% CI: 0.35-7.26).
Data suggest that ED is twice as high in cannabis users compared to controls. Future longitudinal research is needed to confirm/refute this and explore if a dose response relationship between cannabis and ED may be evident.