Epidemiology of premature ejaculation

Abstract

Enhanced attention towards Premature ejaculation (PE) resulted in an increase in published data regarding epidemiology of this sexual disorder over the last decade. However, physicians and researchers must consider the limitations of the epidemiologic methods used while evaluating the quality of these data, most of which were not gathered with well-designed cross-sectional studies and their validities were hampered by both information and selection biases. Although, the prevalence of PE has been repeatedly reported to be around 20-30 %, this reflects the proportion of men who complain from ejaculating prematurely from time to time and the percentage of real PE patients with either lifelong or acquired PE does not seem to be more than 8-10 %. This chapter aims to provide a current-to-date review and a methodological critique of the published descriptive epidemiological data about PE with regard to their validity and reliability.