Impact of onset towards severity of erectile dysfunction in a sample of cardiac patients

Introduction and purpose
            Present study aims to find out a correlation between the onset time of erectile dysfunction and the severity degrees of affection in a sample of cardiac patients.
            Material and method

            The sample includes 215 patients, male, aged between 32 and 77 years, admitted in Hart Institute of Cluj-Napoca. It was used the questionnaire method, the IIEF (International Index of Erectile Function) and for each patient was calculated the score. Also it was investigated the onset time for erectile dysfunction (ED) and for cardiovasculare disease (CVD) (e.g. the onset for ED was at the same time with the onset of CVD, or the onset for ED was 6 months before the onset of CVD, or the onset for ED was 2 years before the onset of CVD and so on).Then, the whole sample was divided in 6 sub-sample (sub-sample 0, 1,….5 according to onset time). For each sub-sample it was calculated the average IIEF score.            Results and discussions
            The average of IIEF score decreases if the onset time of ED is earlier. Therefore, the sub-sample 0 (the onset for ED was at the same time with the onset of CVD) has the average IIEF score 45.9 meanwhile the sub-sample 5 (the onset for ED was more than 4 years before the onset of CVD) has the average IIEF score 22.9, means less than a half.

To ascertain that those differences are statistically significant it was used the t-test: two-sample Assuming Unequal Variances.
            Conclusions

             After comparison of all sub-samples using t-test, we could conclude that the severity of erectile dysfunction is higher if the onset time of ED was earlier and before the onset of cardiovascular disease.