New Study Reveals Effects of Hysterectomy on Sexual Desire

Women under 50 who undergo hysterectomy with oopherectomy are twice as likely as women their age who have not undergone hysterectomy to experience low sexual desire. Low desire hysterectomized women under 50 are also three times more likely to be distressed by their low sexual desire than their non-hysterectomized counterparts.

This is according to a recent study by Sandra Leiblum and other researchers at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, published in 2006 in Menopause, the journal of the North American Menopause Society. The study also found that women 50 and older who have undergone hysterectomy are no more likely to experience low desire or be distressed about their low desire than same-age women who are naturally menopausal.

A thousand women, 20-70 years old, completed a questionnaire with questions about their physical, mental, and social health, sexual functioning and sexual satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction.

Low sexual desire can interfere with a woman’s sexual satisfaction, create differential desire in her sexual relationship, and is associated with low arousal, fewer orgasms, and less sexual pleasure, according to the researchers.

Women with low desire initiated sex less frequently, rarely or never masturbated, and reported relationship dissatisfaction with higher frequency. Low desire women also reported more problems with overall physical, mental, and social health.

While no clear cause of low sexual desire has been proven, this study and others have found a strong relationship between negative mood, and a lack of emotional wellbeing are “major contributors to sexual distress.”

In the past 10 years, the world of women’s sexual dysfunction has been under fire from many sides. Pharmaceutical companies and medical practitioners in pursuit of a “women’s Viagra” have so far failed to develop anything with the efficacy of the drugs now available to men. At the same time, a large minority of sex researchers assert that the idea of medicating or “medicalizing” women’s sexual functioning fails to appreciate the important differences between men’s sexuality and women’s sexuality.

Leonore Teifer, the founder of the “New View” of women’s sexuality, asserts that ack of understanding of women’s sexuality, among medical practitioners and the public alike, has given rise to a culture of unrealistic expectations about women’s sexual functioning, and the failure to recognize crucial differences between men’s and women’s sexualities. Chief among these is the greater influence of social forces on women’s sexual functioning, which makes the treatment of women’s sexual dysfunction far more complex than anything a pill can accomplish.

Certainly the strong relationship between emotional distress and low sexual desire indicates the need for a more complex view of women’s sexual health.