What Morning Erections Can Tell You About Your Health, According to Urologists
· Vice
Morning erections don’t get nearly enough credit. They’re inconvenient, they’re easy to dismiss, and nobody is putting them on a wellness checklist—but according to urologists, they probably should be.
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Nocturnal penile tumescence, the clinical term for what happens when the parasympathetic nervous system takes over during REM sleep and produces erections without any involvement from conscious thought or arousal, is essentially a built-in health diagnostic. Andrew Sun, M.D., a urologist at Urology Partners of North Texas, told Hone Health that morning erections are “a great general indicator of overall penile health,” adding that penile health is determined by vascular, neurological, and hormonal function simultaneously. A single morning erection confirms that all three systems are operating.
How many of them a man should expect varies considerably by age. Teenagers and men in their 20s typically wake up with one most days. By the 30s, that drops to more than half the week. Men in their 40s and 50s can expect somewhere between two and three times weekly, per Dr. Jeff Foster, medical director of men’s health at Voy, who discussed the benchmarks on the Man Alive podcast. By the 60s, once or twice a week is common.
Morning Erections Can Be an Early Warning Sign for Men’s Health, Urologists Say
The gradual decline is normal. A sudden one is not. A persistent loss of morning erections over several weeks can signal erectile dysfunction, diabetes, high blood pressure, or early cardiovascular disease, and research suggests erectile dysfunction can precede a cardiac event by three to five years. The arteries supplying the penis are smaller than coronary arteries, which means vascular problems can surface there first—before any chest pain or obvious cardiac symptoms appear. “Erectile dysfunction is often a hint of underlying heart disease,” cardiologist Michael Joseph Blaha has said in a review for Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Testosterone is the other variable that should be monitored. Testosterone levels decline by roughly 1% per year, which contributes to a drop in nightly erections over time, though 75% of older men have testosterone levels within the normal range and have no trouble with erectile function. Low testosterone has other tells—decreased mood, increased anxiety, weight gain, and diminished muscle mass among the more common ones.
On the podcast, Dr. Foster kept the threshold simple. If a man can’t recall the last time he woke up with an erection, he needs to see a doctor. Inconvenient to bring up, yes. Also worth bringing up.
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