Topical Systematic and Synthetic Literature Review Regarding Men Sexual Dysfunctions after Spinal Cord Injury

Abstract

Introduction Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a life-altering event usually associated with loss of motor and sensory, as well as with bladder, bowel and sexual, functions impairment. Recovering sexual function is one of the most important function tightly coupled with the life quality. In this respect, in the related literature can be found data regarding mainly: diagnosis/evaluation issues therapeutic/assistive-rehabilitative interventions (including connected to fertility troubles) and of psychological and or educational specific counseling, kind. Materials and methods.This paper presents a current systematic (of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses – PRISMA – type) and synthetic literature review on sexual dysfunctions and respected available management options in male subjects with SCI, using the following search keywords/ combinations of key words: “men”, “sexual dysfunction”/ “fertility” / “erectile dysfunction”/ “ejaculatory problems” / “sexual disorder“, “spinal cord injury”, “paraplegia”/ ”tetraplegia” /“paraplegic”/ ”tetraplegic”, “management”/ “treatment”, by interrogating international renown data bases: NCBI/PubMed, NCBI/PMC, Elsevier, PEDro and respectively, ISI Web of Knowledge/Science – to check whether the selected articles are published in ISI indexed journals – considering publications from January 2009 to June 2019, written in English, open access articles and being “fair”/“high” quality on our PEDro inspired, customized quality classification of the selected papers – the basic criterion, being the weighted citations number per year. Results. We have found initially 647 articles and eventually, after accomplishing the PRISMA stages (without meta-analysis), we have selected 16 articles matching all the above mentioned quest method’s requests (see further the figure representing our PRISMA type completed flow-diagram), covering (together with knowledge acquired from extra bibliographic resources, too). Conclusions. Sexual disfunctions after SCI are complex and strongly add to the severe and multimodal disability the affected people – in the case of our work: men – experience. Therefore, they worth being fathomed and periodically reappraised. Keywords: Spinal Cord injury (SCI), men sexual dysfunctions, systematic literature review, rehabilitation,