Association Between Multiple Sclerosis and Erectile Dysfunction: A Nationwide Case-Control Study

Background. Multiple sclerosis (MS) commonly affects young adults who may be sexually active, with sexual dysfunction being a significant, but often underestimated, symptom of MS. However, no large-scaled study has investigated the association between erectile dysfunction (ED) and MS in an Asian population to date. Objective. The objective of this study is to estimate the association between ED and a prior diagnosis of MS using a population-based dataset with a case-control design in Taiwan. Methods. The data were sourced from National Health Insurance Research Database. We identified 38,139 patients with ED as cases and randomly selected 262,848 subjects as controls. We then used conditional logistic regression to compute the odds ratio for having previously received a diagnosis of MS between cases and controls. Results. The prevalence of prior MS was 0.037% and 0.015% for cases and controls, respectively (P