Summary:
The aim of our study was to assess whether erectile dysfunction (ED) in
hypertensive men is correlated with more severe, hypertension subclinical
target-organ damage.
We examined 184 patients with newly diagnosed, untreated hypertension. Besides
the routine clinical and laboratory tests, 24-h ambulatory blood pressure
monitoring-ABPM, echocardiogram, assessment of urinary excreted albumin as
albumin/creatinine ratio-ACR and pulse wave velocity-PWV was performed.
By means of IIEF-5 questionnaire,ED was diagnosed in 24.7% of hypertensive men.
Hypertensives with ED were older, whereas they did not differ in other basic,
clinical and laboratory parameters (office blood pressure-BP, body mass index,
waist circumference, smoking, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia) compared to
patients without ED. Moreover, there were no difference in the majority of ABPM
parameters, with the exception of pulse pressure, night mean systolic BP and
dipping status,in which patients with ED had more unfavorable findings.
Hypertensives with and without ED did not differ regarding left ventricle mass,
glomerular filtration rate e-GFR, ACR or PWV, but hypertensives with ED had
more impaired left ventricle’s diastolic function.
Consequently, from our findings the presence of more severe hypertension
target-organ damage does not seem completely established in hypertensives with
ED, without obscuring the value of ED assessment.
