Discussing sexual health with aging patients in primary care: Exploratory findings at a Canadian urban academic hospital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexuality is an important component of overall health and quality of life, yet evidence suggests many aging adults are not discussing sexual health with their physician. The objective of this study was to understand practices of primary care physicians in discussing sexual health with aging patients. An electronic survey was distributed to primary care physicians and family medicine residents at an urban academic hospital in Ontario, Canada. The survey captured the self-reported prevalence of discussions of sexual health with patients aged 50 and above as well as patient, physician and contextual factors influencing the likelihood of discussion. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the results. Among the 37 physicians who responded to the survey (response rate of 24%), physicians were more likely to discuss sexual health with patients aged 50–75 years than with patient s>75 years with both males (p<0.0001) and females (p<0.0001). Most frequently discussed issues with males were erectile dysfunction and sexually transmitted infection, while atrophic vaginitis, bleeding, and pain during intercourse were most often discussed with females. Factors limiting discussion include lack of time, multiple patient comorbidities and a perceived disinterest in sexual activity. 54% of respondents report having adequate knowledge to discuss and manage later life sexual health issues. Proactively discussing sexuality with aging adults may reveal underlying illness and facilitate future help-seeking behaviours. We suggest that primary care physicians have a responsibility to routinely initiate such discussions in clinical practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".