Article written by Dr Catherine Solano, sex therapist 

Before talking about the difficulties due to diabetes, let’s start by clarifying that diabetes is only a risk factor for sexual difficulties. Being diabetic does not necessarily mean having sexual problems. Joël, 69, diabetic and suffering from prostate adenoma (= enlarged prostate) has no sexual difficulties. Yet he has been diabetic for 20 years! To give a figure, according to studies, 20 to 71% of diabetic men also suffer from sexual problems. We see that the range is very wide and the figures correspond to different realities depending on the importance of the disorders, the age of the diabetes, the quality of its follow-up, etc.

In diabetic women, it is observed that 27% of them suffer from a sexual dysfunction instead of 14% in non-diabetic women.

But sexual dysfunctions have been much less studied in women …