Strategies for self-management of painful intercourse among female pregnancy planners
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Despite the fact that painful intercourse is common among reproductive-aged females, little research has evaluated how people manage painful intercourse while trying to conceive. AIM: To characterize the self-reported frequency and effectiveness of various self-management strategies among a population of pregnancy planners reporting painful intercourse in the past 4 weeks. METHODS: We used cross-sectional data from Pregnancy Study Online, an online preconception cohort study of pregnancy planners. Female-identified participants completed a baseline questionnaire that included questions about demographic, medical, and reproductive factors. Participants additionally completed an optional questionnaire asking about sexual function. We used a single question from the Female Sexual Function Index to evaluate painful intercourse: "Over the past 4 weeks, how often did you experience discomfort or pain during vaginal penetration (intercourse)?," with responses captured on a Likert scale from "Almost never or never" to "Almost always or always." Those who reported pain more frequently than "Almost never or never" were categorized as experiencing "any pain" with intercourse and completed additional questions about how they mitigated it. For each endorsed strategy, participants ranked how effective it was at improving pain on a Likert scale from "Never effective" to "Always effective." For analyses, we grouped "often" and "always" effective into a single category. We described the reported effectiveness of self-management strategies. OUTCOMES: The prevalence of participants reporting a strategy as being "often" or "always" effective at improving pain. RESULTS: In our sample of 2855 pregnancy planners, 855 (30.7%) reported any painful intercourse in the past 4 weeks. The most commonly tried pain management strategy was trying a different sex position (66.6% of participants), while the least common strategy was not allowing full penetration of the penis (29.9%). Lubricant was most effective, with 74.3% of participants reporting that it was "often or always" effective. The least effective strategy was finishing intercourse quickly, with only 32.5% of attempters reporting it was "often or always" effective. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Providers should be aware of strategies to improve painful intercourse to aid in patient counseling, both in the preconception period and more broadly when pursuing the diagnosis of, and medical management strategies for, dyspareunia. STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS: Large geographic heterogeneity and low data missingness. Limitations include potential for misclassification and the use of non-validated self-report measures. CONCLUSION: In a population of females trying to conceive, lubricant use and changing sex positions were frequently reported as "often or always" effective at improving painful intercourse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".