Tonight's 60 Minutes program featured the claim that smokers and secondhand smokers were twice as likely to suffer impotence.
Although I missed the first few minutes of the program where 60 Minutes apparently featured a study by a researcher named McKinley (a Medline search proved fruitless), Mike Wallace said that a 1994 CDC study supported McKinley's claims. The CDC reported smokers were twice as likely as nonsmokers to be impotent.
In fact, CDC's study reported a crude, unadjusted odds ratio of 1.8 (95 percent confidence interval 1.2 - 2.6) for smoking and impotence. But once the odds ratio was adjusted for various confounders, including vascular disease, psychiatric disease, hormonal factors, substance abuse, marital status, race and age, the odds ratio became a statistically nonsignificant 1.5 (95 percent confidence interval 1.0 - 2.2). The study further concluded that "Neither years smoked nor cigarettes smoked daily were significant predictors of impotence in current smokers." Hardly the conclusion 60 Minutes touted.
As to secondhand smoke being as great a risk factor for impotence as smoking, I'm still laughing. Smokers not only smoke, but are exposed to their own secondhand smoke. If there really was a relationship between cigarette smoke and impotence, smokers should have a much higher risk than secondhand smokers.
From what I could tell, this report was just another 60 Minutes boner. (No pun intended.)
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