SAFER SEX blog

Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16282622/wid/11915773?GT1=8816

Regular romps can provide a host of physiological benefits

Forbes.com
Updated: 2:03 p.m. ET Dec 19, 2006

The best that modern science can say for abstinence is that it’s harmless when practiced in moderation. “Saving yourself” before the big game, the big business deal, the big hoe-down or the big bakeoff may indeed confer some moral advantage; but physiologically it does zip.

Having regular and enthusiastic sex, by contrast, confers a host of measurable physiological advantages, be you male or female. (This assumes that you are engaging in sex without contracting a sexually transmitted disease.)

In one of the most credible studies correlating overall health with sexual frequency, Queens University in Belfast tracked the mortality of about 1,000 middle-aged men over the course of a decade. The study was designed to compare people of similar age and health. Its findings, published in 1997 in the British Medical Journal, were that men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards. Other studies (some rigorous, some less so) purport to show that having sex even a few times a week has an associative or causal relationship with the following:

• Improved sense of smell: After sex, production of the hormone prolactin surges. This, in turn, causes stem cells in the brain to develop new neurons in the brain’s olfactory bulb, its smell center.
• Reduced risk of heart disease: In a 2001 follow-up to the Queens University study mentioned above, researchers focused on cardiovascular health. Their finding? That by having sex three or more times a week, men reduced their risk of heart attack or stroke by half.
• Weight loss, overall fitness: Sex, if nothing else, is exercise. A vigorous bout burns some 200 calories — about the same as running 15 minutes on a treadmill or playing a spirited game of squash. The pulse rate, in a person aroused, rises from about 70 beats per minute to 150, the same as that of an athlete putting forth maximum effort.

Related articles:

• Do we really have a sexual prime?
• Condoms a big problem for men in India

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Link: http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/12/19/premarital.sex.ap/index.html

NEW YORK (AP) — More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

“This is reality-check research,” said the study’s author, Lawrence Finer. “Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades.”

Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and which disagrees with government-funded programs that rely primarily on abstinence-only teachings. The study, released Tuesday, appears in the new issue of Public Health Reports.

The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people — about 33,000 of them women — in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer’s analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.

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Link: Advocate.com

Circumcising adult men may reduce by half their risk of contracting HIV through heterosexual intercourse, the U.S. government announced Wednesday, as it shut down two studies in Africa testing the link. The National Institutes of Health closed the studies in Kenya and Uganda early, after safety monitors took a look at initial results this week and noted the degree of protection. The studies’ uncircumcised men are being offered the chance to undergo the procedure.

The link between male circumcision and HIV prevention was noted as long ago as the late 1980s. The first major clinical trial, of 3,000 men in South Africa, found last year that circumcision cut the HIV risk by 60%.

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This recently identified sleep disorder is keeping some folks up at night, it seems.  Sexsomnia, a disorder which causes people to have sex or masturbate in their sleep, is a subset of a more well-know sleep disorder called parasomnia.  Parasomnia is the same phenomenon that causes people to walk in their sleep.

Sexsomnia, as one might guess, is somewhat more specialized.

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Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061201/od_nm/germany_condom1_dc
Fri Dec 1, 8:40 AM ETBERLIN (Reuters) - German sex educators plan to launch a spray-on condom tailor-made for all sizes.

Jan Vinzenz Krause from the Institute for Condom Consultancy, a Singen-based practice that offers advice on condom use, told Reuters Thursday the product aimed to help people enjoy better and safer sex lives.

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