While patients like me know that our health issues can interfere with our sex lives, it’s actually starting to be researched and documented!

That’s right – now you, too, can find seemingly redundant research telling you what you already know.

I know it’s easy to feel that way. The truth is, though, that research is finally catching up to common knowledge. Without basic research, it’s hard to expand and do what feels like ‘real’ work. Take Tristano’s 2014 writing on rheumatoid arthritis and sexual function, for instance. While it may be what we patients consider obvious knowledge, it opened the eyes of a lot of health care providers to the subject of sex and chronic illness.

Recently, a literature review on sex and RA came out. It found that there was a significant increase in what they call ‘sexual dysfunction’ for RA patients.

Back in 2016, a study showed that nearly a third of RA patients deal with major factors that inhibit their sex lives. That includes fear, insecurity, pain, comorbidities, and so much more.

What comorbidities? Well, secondary Sjogren’s syndrome is a major one. It often goes undiagnosed and un- or undertreated. These studies also have an average participant age of late 40s to late 50s, too. That means that issues associated with menopause might be being included as RA symptoms.

Medications bring their own side effects, too.

Unfortunately, most of these studies are being conducted on cisgender patients in heterosexual relationships. Between all this and the damage done by the phrase ‘sexual dysfunction?’ It makes me want to do my own research…

And I’m actually starting some in a few months in a larger population… but that’s a topic for another time. Stay tuned…