Antidepressant-related sexual dysfunction (ADr-SD) is the most frequent and long-lasting adverse event, often underestimated and rarely spontaneously communicated. Strategies to manage it haven’t been explored to date.

To explore ADr-SD clinical management in regular practice.

1. 1. To stablish the prevalence of SD in patients following antidepressant treatment.

2. 2. To describe the therapeutic interventions used when SD is detected.

Cross-sectional, multicentric and naturalistic study. Patients taking antidepressant for at least two months without previous SD were included. SD was evaluated with the specific questionnaire PR-Sex-DQ (SALSEX, Montejo et al 2001).

1988 out of 2000 patients recruited resulted eligible for the analysis. According to PRSexDQ scores SD was present in 87.5% ot the sample. Only 44.2% communicated it spontaneusly. 66.2% reported regular to poor tolerance of SD and 19.6% had thought about discontinuing treatment due to it. Regarding the therapeutic interventions used for managing ADr-SD, waiting for its spontaneus remission was the most frequent strategy reported (36.8%), followed by changing the antidepressant (32.5%) and reducing the dosage (18.5%); 5% chosed “weekend holidays”, 4% discontinued the antidepressant, 2.5% associated another antidepressant and 1.3% added a 5-phosphodiesterase inhibitor. Bupropion and mirtazapine were the antidepressants most frequently selected for the switching and association strategies.

These results study highlight the high rates of SD related to antidepressants and its potential association with non-adherence to treatment. Despite this unfortunatelly clinicians do prefer to wait rather than performing any active strategy to manage this adverse event.