Post-SSRI sexual dysfunction: barriers to quantifying incidence and prevalence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While sexual dysfunction is a well-known side effect of taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), in an undetermined number of patients, sexual function does not return to pre-drug baseline after stopping SSRIs. The condition is known as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD) and is characterised most commonly by genital numbness, pleasureless or weak orgasm, loss of libido and erectile dysfunction. This article provides a commentary on the incidence and prevalence of PSSD based on a combination of academic literature as well as clinical and research experience. A number of obstacles to quantifying the occurrence of PSSD are outlined including difficulty in designing a suitable study method. Other contextual obstacles include patient embarrassment at raising sexual concerns, the response of healthcare professionals, inability to stop an antidepressant due to withdrawal issues in a proportion of patients and patient unawareness that their sexual difficulties are linked to prior medication compounded by variability of online information and a lack of information aimed at public education. A definition of PSSD with diagnostic criteria has been published. A MedDRA code for PSSD has also been introduced, but this is yet to be adopted by regulators.
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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 | 0.036 | 0.110 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".