Rheumatology Advance Access originally published online on August 3, 2009
Rheumatology 2009 48(11):1337-1338; doi:10.1093/rheumatology/kep231
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Rheumatology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Editorial |
Sex and the spondylitic
1Rheumatology Department, Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow, Middlesex, UK
Correspondence to: Rheumatology Department, Northwick Park Hospital, Harrow, Middlesex HA1 3UJ, UK. E-mail: Andrew.Keat@nwlh.nhs.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In this issue of the Journal, Healey et al. [1] should be congratulated for tackling a rather taboo subject in rheumatology, namely the problems that people with AS have in their sex lives. In the best traditions of clinical research, however, this work raises more questions than it answers. As a result, the study is not susceptible to easy interpretation but nonetheless underlines one important message—that life quality may be subtly impaired in AS—and points out many areas for future research.
Their approach of simply inviting individuals with known spondylitis to fill in a questionnaire is a good start. Although 36% of the patients preferred not to disclose the information or at least to complete the questionnaire, the response rate was commendable. Inevitably, those who completed the questionnaire were people who attended hospitals and, hence, those with most severe disease. Nonetheless, those at