Sex addiction may affect 10 percent of men, survey finds.

Women make up 40 percent of those affected, the researchers found.

A surprising number of adults report significant levels of
 stress and
 dysfunction
 because of their sexual thoughts or behaviors, new research finds.

Is sex dependancy real? Researchers say it might also be, or at least something shut to it and might be greater frequent than everybody thought.

Ten percentage of guys and 7 percentage of girls say they have giant tiers of stress and dysfunction due to the fact of their sexual ideas or behaviors, the researchers suggested Friday.

A countrywide survey of greater than 2,000 adults found on average, greater than 8 percent of them pronounced signs and symptoms of compulsive sexual conduct disease — a  power sample of failure in controlling excessive sexual urges that lead to misery and social impairment.

It’s certainly controversial, Janna Dickenson of the University of Minnesota and colleagues wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network Open.

“From Tiger Woods to Harvey Weinstein, information articles have conjectured that ‘sex addiction’ is a growing and heretofore unrecognized ‘epidemic,’ while the scientific neighborhood debates whether or not such a problem even exists,” they wrote.

But it’s no longer that hard to define, they said: “failing to control one’s sexual feelings and behaviors in a way that motives widespread misery and/or impairment in functioning.”

It's the impairment part that things — human beings must feel like the ideas or behaviors intrude with ordinary life in some way.

They used statistics from a massive national questionnaire, the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, to see how common sexual behavior issues might be. It asks a variety of questions, including:

• How frequently have you had to bother controlling your sexual urges?
• How often have you felt unable to manipulate sexual behavior?
• How regularly have you made pledges or guarantees to exchange or alter your sexual behavior?
• How frequently have your sexual thoughts or behaviors interfered with relationships?

“Distress and impairment related with subject controlling sexual feelings, urges, and conduct had been measured the usage of the Compulsive Sexual Behavior Inventory,” Dickenson and colleagues wrote.

“A rating of 35 or higher on a scale of 0 to sixty-five indicated clinically relevant stages of distress and/or impairment.”

A shocking quantity of human beings scored that high, and 40 percent of them have been women, Dickenson’s team wrote. Overall, simply under 9 percent of humans met the cutoff.

“Gender differences had been smaller than in the past theorized, with 10.3 percent of men and 7 percent of ladies endorsing clinically relevant degrees of distress and/or impairment related with the problem controlling sexual feelings, urges, and behavior,” they wrote.

That would make compulsive sexual conduct problems greater common than important depression, which impacts 5 percentage of people. Doctors may additionally desire to keep an eye out for the problem, they said.

“Health care gurus be alert to the high variety of people who are distressed about their sexual behavior, carefully verify the nature of the trouble within its sociocultural context, and locate fantastic redress for both men and women,” they wrote.

It’s viable the problem is exaggerated, and it may want to be the questionnaire labeled human beings with moderate issues as having a disorder, they said. Psychiatrists have disagreed on whether or not it’s a proper disorder. They debated whether to encompass intercourse addiction as a prognosis in the modern-day edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) and opted now not to.

And many agree people who declare they have a psychological problem with their sexual feelings are just making excuses for bad behavior.

“I am no longer sure when being a selfish, misogynistic jerk grew to become a medical disorder,” David J. Ley, a medical psychologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the creator of "The Myth of Sex Addiction”, informed NBC News in 2017.

“This is a thought that has been used to give an explanation for selfish, powerful, wealthy guys attractive in irresponsible impulsive sexual conduct for a lengthy time,” Ley said.