Elderly Enjoying Lots of Sex, Study Reveals

By R. Siva Kumar - 29 Jan '15 10:08AM

Even after 70 years, you can continue to enjoy sex well into your 80s, says research by the University of Manchester and NatCen Social Research.

A questionnaire was sent out to 7,000 people. More than half the men (54 percent) and nearly a third of the women (31 percent) on the other side of 70 years admitted that they still enjoyed sex. One-third of the group said that they had it often---at least twice a month.

This is the first kind of study that has looked at the sex habits of over 80-year-olds, according to huffingtonpost.com

The paper explained that the main determinants of sex are health and "conflicting partnership factors" rather than age alone, wrote Dr. David Lee, an Age UK Research Fellow at The University of Manchester's School of Social Sciences. His paper was published in the American academic journal, Archives of Sexual Behavior.

A press release elaborated: "We hope our findings improve public health by countering stereotypes and misconceptions about late-life sexuality, and offer older people a reference against which they may relate their own experiences and expectations."

He added, "Our ongoing research is also highlighting the diversity of late-life sexualities, and trying to impose youthful norms of sexual health on older people would be over-simplistic and even unhelpful." Hence, women over 70 find it difficult to get sexually aroused, even as men encounter erectile difficulty.

The flipside is outlined by the Centers for Disease Control, which reports that sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are catching on. Since 2007, the number of seniors contracting syphilis has shot up by 52 percent, even as chlamydia went up by 32 percent. Currently, Medicare has opened free STD screenings for elders, even as British studies find that there are similar STD trends among older people.

Through another probe, about one-fourth of the US seniors above 85 years in the US reported that they had sex in the previous year.

Old age can be fun then in bed---in more ways than you can imagine.