It's always at the end of the exam.
“They’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, Doc. Just one other thing. I almost forgot—I’ve been having a little problem getting an erection.’
“They dread talking about it,” Dr. Chris Schrepferman ’91 says. “But Viagra and the pharmaceutical industry have given men the ability to discuss it. Before those came along, the treatments weren’t very good, and guys just didn’t talk about it at all.”
It’s a conversation that could save their lives.
“There’s a subset of patients for whom the onset of erectile dysfunction (ED) is the first sign of body-wide vascular disease, which puts them at risk of stroke and heart attack,” the Louisville urologist says. “So if you’re having erectile dysfunction problems, in addition to having hormone levels checked, you should also have an electro-cardiogram and an examination of your cardio-vascular health to make sure it’s not a sign of an underlying vascular problem.”
He recalls the case of a runner who was training for a triathlon and complained of erectile dysfunction to his primary care doctor. When the physician recommended a cardiac stress test, the athlete laughed it off.
“This runner was also a doctor, and he thought he was just fine,”Schrepferman recalls. “But he ended up having to get a stint in one of his main cardiac arteries.
“This guy ran marathons, yet he had vascular disease far advanced for a person his age, and the place it showed up was in erectile dysfunction.”
Schrepferman urges his patients with ED to have their hearts examined.
Another reason to have that difficult conversation with your doctor.
