Erectile dysfunction reached 54.37% among men in the highest workplace stress group, about 10 times the odds seen in the lowest stress group, according to a study of 826 full-time working men aged 22 to 40 published September 9 in the International Journal of Clinical Practice. The publisher’s news release asks whether work stress can cause erectile dysfunction. This study cannot answer that.
Here is what a reader can do with it. If your erections have changed recently and you are in your twenties or thirties, that is a reason to book an appointment, not a reason to buy pills online. In young men, erectile trouble is often the first visible sign of a problem in the blood vessels or the metabolism. Job stress is worth looking at, and so are blood pressure, blood sugar and sleep. Which tests you need is a conversation with your doctor.
Key takeaways
- Erectile dysfunction affected 54.37% of the highest workplace stress group in this study of 826 men aged 22 to 40.
- The higher a man’s reported work stress, the higher his rate of erectile dysfunction.
- Nobody assigned these men their stress levels, so the study shows a link, not a cause.
What the study found
Investigators scored five parts of workplace stress: working hours, decision-making autonomy, supervisor support, colleague relationships and promotion pressure, and measured erectile function alongside blood levels of cortisol, testosterone and other hormones. According to the release from Wiley, “a dose-response relationship was observed between workplace stress and erectile function.” Erectile dysfunction in the high-stress group “reached 54.37%, with 10-times higher odds of erectile dysfunction compared with the low-stress group.”
The authors also report a sequence. Cortisol elevation came 2 to 4 weeks before testosterone decline, and testosterone changes came 4 to 6 weeks before erectile function worsened, which they say suggests a 6 to 10 week window for intervening. Long hours appeared to act through raised cortisol, while supervisor support “exerted a protective effect by maintaining testosterone levels.”
“Integration of psychological stress assessment and hormone testing can effectively identify individuals at high risk for psychogenic erectile dysfunction,” the authors wrote.
Dr. Kumar’s take
Start with the 54% figure, because it is doing most of the work in the headlines. A 2025 review in Cureus reports that in a U.S. cohort study of 2,660 young men, “the overall prevalence of ED was 14.2%,” and that other studies put the figure in men under 40 at “as high as 35%.” More than half of one group sits well above that range, which points to a questionnaire counting mild or occasional difficulty, or a sample of men who volunteered because something was already wrong.
Then the “10 times” number. That is an odds figure, and odds are not risk. When an outcome affects more than half a group, the odds comparison runs far ahead of the real gap in how many men are affected. Ten times the odds is not ten times the men.
The tidiest claim is also the weakest. Cortisol rising, testosterone falling two to four weeks later, erections suffering four to six weeks after that, is a laboratory-clean timeline. Real working men are not laboratories. Sleep, drinking, weight and relationships all move at once, and sleep loss alone raises cortisol the following evening. Cortisol is also harder to measure well than it looks, as the argument over the cortisol awakening response shows. An observational study cannot pin the order of events to the week, and the arrow can point the other way: erectile problems and low testosterone make a demanding job feel worse.
The International Journal of Clinical Practice is a general open access journal, not a urology or endocrinology specialty title. That does not make the work wrong, but this is a first report, not a settled finding. What survives is still useful: chronic stress, poor sleep and testosterone are connected, the direction of the link is biologically sensible, and its size is almost certainly inflated.
What it means for you
New or worsening erectile problems in a young man deserve a proper workup rather than a shrug or a prescription. Blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and a check for sleep apnea are the boring items that matter most, because they are the ones that shorten lives. A morning testosterone level may be reasonable if other symptoms fit. Your doctor decides which of these apply to you. Job stress and short sleep are worth fixing for their own sake, whatever this study turns out to mean.
The 6 to 10 week window is a hypothesis the authors put forward from their own timing data, and nobody has tested whether cutting work stress on that schedule restores erectile function.