Health News Blog provides coverage of current health news.

Increasingly, gerontologists and psychiatrists are becoming aware that senility, including apparent senile dementia, is often not due to brain decay but to the inappropriate use of many medications, or to small strokes which occur in people who have high blood pressure.

Although, with age, increasing disabilities occur, and some illnesses are more common, you can minimize the effects of ageing and reduce the disabilities if you take action yourself.

Eating sensibly is not difficult if you have the motivation, and will help to reduce your weight, if you are fat, and control your blood pressure. As you grow older, you body needs less energy to keep it in good shape, and older people tend to be less active. For these two reasons you should take in less energy – less calories – as you need less. If you do not you will become fat. A sensible diet will help you avoid this danger, and will enable you to be more healthy.

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In most marriages, the age of each partner is within five years of the other, so that the period of the man’s emotional instability may coincide with his wife’s menopause. This period of her life is often one of emotional turbulence, when she questions her role as a housewife and mother.

If both partners are affected by the emotional stresses of middle age, minor conflicts and misunderstandings may be magnified and become major causes of hostility or frustration, so that the couple become irritated with each other. This in turn aggravates the emotional instability. In this situation, some men lose their zest for sex, because their emotional instability leads to depression. Depression is a major factor in reducing a person’s sexual desire and capacity. Some men may even become impotent. The impotence may last for a few months, or may persist for years, damaging further the relationship with the man’s partner and destroying his self-esteem. In other cases, a man may lose his sexual zest because he perceives his sexual relationship as monotonous or boring. His partner no longer excites him. He has become too familiar with the way she responds, with her expressions, with her behaviour. He knows in advance what she will do. Sex has become a routine duty, not a time of mutual enjoyment and sharing. How the man reacts depends on how he has perceived sex when he was young. If he was brought up to believe in the double standard of sexuality and that women have a relative lack of sexual passion, he may perceive that sex with a familiar partner is boring. He sees sex as something special for him, not as a mutual enjoyment. He expects the woman to stimulate him, but feels no need to stimulate her. Because he is not stimulated, he blames his wife for their sexual problems, rather than putting some of the blame on himself. If neither partner has been able to tell the other, over the years, about his or her sexual desires and needs, and if there has been little communication using body language, by middle age their sexual relationship may have deteriorated. It is easier to blame your partner than to look for faults in yourself.

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The complications follow the spread of the causative organism to the man’s bladder or prostate gland. If the bladder becomes infected, the man complains of severe pain, especially when he passes urine, which he wants to do all too often, and is often unable to do because of the pain. If the organism spreads into the prostate gland, it causes discomfort deep in the pelvis. Sometimes the spread is without symptoms, but from the warm security of the prostate gland, the disease may affect distant organs. In fact, a peculiar group of symptoms seem to follow untreated NSU. These are conjunctivitis, urethritis, and painful swellings of several of the bigger joints, a form of acute arthritis. The conjunctivitis and urethritis start days, or weeks, after exposure to infection, and settle quite quickly. The arthritis starts rather more slowly and persists. There may be associated fever and a feeling of being vaguely ill. There is reason to believe that the group of symptoms – called a syndrome – are due to an allergic reaction to persistence of the organism in the body, probably in the prostate gland. The syndrome settles after a few months, and the joints usually recover, but further attacks are usual, and these may lead to permanent damage and deformities of the affected joints.

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In some cases both partners ‘fake’. The man ‘fakes’ an ejaculation (which leaves him frustrated, although he can often get an orgasm by masturbating later). The woman ‘fakes’ that she believes he has ejaculated, although she knows that he has not. Eventually, both are found out, and neither is helped by the deception.

The degree of the ejaculatory incompetence varies. Some men can ejaculate normally with one woman, but fail to climax with another, particularly if the man feels anxiety or guilt about the relationship or is hostile to, or bored with, his partner. Other men, after much effort, get the feeling that they are about to ejaculate, but in place of an intense pleasurable orgasm find that the semen seeps instead of spurting out of the penis, so that the man feels that he had an unsatisfactory climax. This pattern is not unusual if a man is preoccupied, or tired, or in conflict with his partner, although in such cases the inability to ejaculate is usually transient.

Several myths about sexual intercourse in pregnancy need to be exposed, as they are not true. The first is that the penis thrusting in the woman’s vagina may cause an abortion. The second is that penile thrusting in late pregnancy may damage the baby, break the ‘bag of water’, introduce infection, or lead to premature labour. None of these dangers is real. The third is that if a woman has an orgasm when pregnant it will injure the baby or start labour prematurely. This is also untrue, although some obstetricians prohibit sexual intercourse in late pregnancy if the woman has previously had premature labours.

Of course, both partners may choose methods of sexual gratification other than sexual intercourse, and still obtain as much pleasure. A woman who is not particularly aroused may prefer to help her husband to have an orgasm by stimulating his penis with her hand or by sucking it. Or she may prefer to enjoy sex by asking her husband to stimulate her clitoral area with his fingers or tongue, rather than having sexual intercourse. If she prefers cunnilingus, the man should not blow into her vagina (which increases sexual excitement for some women) during pregnancy, as some pregnant women have died after this action. However, cunnilingus, without blowing in the woman’s vagina, is safe and enjoyable.

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