Nocturnal erections, differential diagnosis of impotence, and diabetes. I Karacan, FB Scott, PJ Salis, SL Attia, JC Ware, A Altinel, and RL Williams.

摘要

Karacan et al. published this landmark paper [1] in 1976 with the aim of proposing the monitoring of nocturnal penile erections as "the" tool that might remove the bias in the diagnosis of erectile dysfunction.In the Introduction authors stated that the diagnosis and treatment of impotence remained, at that time, "essentially an art, if not a myth," because of a belief that impotence was only result of psychological disturbances.They wrote that nocturnal erections had been known for almost 30 years and in the last 10 years their group had concluded that the normality of nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) was a reliable and objective indicator of the psychological or organic basis of erectile dysfunction (KD); an abnormal NPT indicated an organogenic ED, whereas a normal NPT lead to the diagnosis of psychogenic ED.