How Many Men Have Spontaneous Erections?

Posting Date: 06/28/2001

Originally published on May 10, 2001.

I?ve never seen an article like this before. This is a study conducted in Holland and I thought I?d read it to you. It is entitled: Incidents of priapism in the general population. Priapism is a long term for unwanted erection in a man, and it can be very dangerous.

However, I?ve never seen a study on how many men are walking around with unwanted erections. Researchers looked at 145,000 medical records and found that every year, 1.5 out of 100,000 men will get this.

It is more likely that men 40 years of age and older will experience priapism. The incidence rate for men over 40 is 2.9 per 100,000.

Researchers could not identify any one single cause for this disorder. Out of five patients with priapism, two had no apparent cause. Two men experienced priapism after an injection of vasodilators and one patient had had sickle cell disease.

Two types of priapism are described in this study ? low flow and high flow. We won?t get you into the differences here, but if you have the low flow type, it means the veins are blocked and you get a stagnation of the blood and can get gangrene. This is why men who have used former generations of erectile dysfunction drugs ? where they inject themselves ? had problems with priapism. You get a permanent erection if you get gangrene, it will fall off and then it?s not going to happen anymore.

The causes of low flow priapism can be: sickle cell disease, leukemia ? you get like a clotting that blocks the flow ? and the use of trazodone and sildenafil. Some incidences of priapism can also be idiopathic, which means there is no cause. So some guys are walking around and they?re just saying, I don?t know why. He?s just there, because he?s there.

Source: Adult Urology, May 2001, Vol. 57;No. 5;970-972.

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