Erectile dysfunction and covid-19: quantitative pilot study in georgia

OBJECTIVES: Erectile Dysfunction (ED) as the most frequent type of male sexual disorder, can be caused by many organic (cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, and other metabolic disorders, hypogonadism, and e.t.) or psychogenic diseases. Covid-19 pandemic has risen an important question: Could the Covid infection affect erectile function? Given the extremely high incidence of covid infection in Georgia, we could collect for a very short time (July – September 2021) the number of patients that was enough for the first evidence based pilot study in Georgia in which we tried to examine this problem. METHODS: 33 patients of different ages (18-60) were included in this study. All patients had undergone covid-19 infectious and had begun complaining to primarily ED or to exacerbation of ED in remission after previous ED treatment immediately after recovery from covid-19. We studied lab tests and provided psychodiagnostic examinations. Data were processed according to multivariate statistical analysis. RESULTS: The study found that among patients who underwent moderate(48%) or hard form (12.1%) of covid 19, 81,8% had impaired ED. None of them was vaccinated. After psychodiagnostic examination anxiety and depression were found in 27% of patients. No one from them did not complain of psychological complications before covid 19. In the remaining 73 % of patients, the exact cause of ED was unclear (p>.001). CONCLUSIONS: Despite small-scale research, it was revealed that Covid-19 had quite damaged the erectile function. also, the problem could be attached to anxiety and depression that was found out just after psychodiagnostic examination. Such a method could be recommended for the process of diagnostic for patients with ED after Covid-19. It also should be noted that the main reasons for ED after Covid-19 remain unclear but in our opinion, ED could be assessed as one of the clinical significant components for the post-covid syndrome. CONFLICTS OF INTEREST: There is no conflict of interest