What’s age got to do with sex?

NEW YORK: Most Americans remain sexually active into their 60s, and nearly half continue to have sex regularly into their early 70s, researchers reported on Thursday as a result of the most comprehensive national survey to date of sexual behaviour among older adults.

But many older people also report struggling with sexual problems, like reduced desire and erectile difficulties, the survey found.

The new report, appearing in The New England Journal of Medicine, was based on interviews with more than 3,000 Americans, 57 to 85 years old, who gave detailed descriptions of their sexual activities.

It found that for varied reasons, women were significantly less likely than men to report being sexually active from age 57 on. Women were more often without a partner, for example, and were more likely to say they no longer derived much pleasure from sex.

Experts said that the new survey provided the first clear and complete picture of sexuality in later life and that it should give older adults a sense of where they stand compared with their peers. Researchers have done previous surveys of sexual activity among older people, but those studies were of patients or other groups who were not nationally representative.

“There’s a large perception out there that sex somehow does not occur in the later years, and this study demonstrates authoritatively that for many people sexual activity does not diminish much at all,” said Dr Robert N Butler, president of the International Longevity Center in New York and co-author with his late wife, Myrna I. Lewis, of “Love and Sex After Sixty.”

“Human relationships are important to the very end,” said Dr. Butler, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers, at the University of Chicago and the University of Toronto, contacted by letter a representative group of 3,005 older adults across the country. Trained interviewers then conducted a two-hour face-to-face session with each of these men and women, asking about their sexual activities as well as their physical and social health and other aspects of their lives.

The study found that 84 percent of men from 57 to 64 reported having had some sexual contact with another person in the last year, compared with 62 percent of women in the same age group.