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Are aspects of study design associated with the reported prevalence of female sexual difficulties?

journal contribution
posted on 2008-09-01, 00:00 authored by R Hayes, Catherine BennettCatherine Bennett, L Dennerstein, J Taffe, C Fairley
Objective: To investigate associations between the prevalence of sexual  difficulties reported in published studies and design features of those studies to determine if differences in design contribute to variation in prevalence estimates.
Design: Systematic review, multivariate analysis.
Setting: Studies published internationally in English.
Patient(s): Not applicable.
Intervention(s): None.
Main Outcome Measure(s): Prevalence estimates of difficulty with desire, arousal, orgasm, and sexual pain reported in published studies.
Result(s): Our systematic literature search identified 1,380 publications. Fifty-five studies met our inclusion criteria (reporting prevalence, sample size and response rate, sample size greater than 100, not clinic based). Reported prevalence of sexual difficulty varied across studies (up to tenfold). Eleven aspects of research conduct in these studies were included in our multivariate analysis as explanatory variables. Five aspects of study design and conduct (data collection procedures, inclusion criteria, duration of sexual difficulty recorded, sample size, and response rate) were associated with the reported prevalence of at least one type of sexual difficulty independently of likely predictors of true variation in prevalence: study location, study year, and age range of participants.
Conclusion(s): This review provides evidence that study design may influence reported prevalence estimates of female sexual difficulties and contribute to the wide variation in published estimates.

History

Journal

Fertility and sterility

Volume

90

Issue

3

Pagination

497 - 505

Publisher

Elsevier

Location

New York, N.Y.

ISSN

1556-5653

eISSN

1546-2501

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1.1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal; C Journal article

Copyright notice

2008, Elsevier