Psychometric differentiation of psychogenic and organic erectile disorders

A study was conducted to assess the discriminant validity of patient responses to a questionnaire in distinguishing between organic and psychogenic erectile dysfunction. A total of 56 urologist-referred veterans slept for 3 nights in a sleep laboratory for nocturnal penile tumescence recording. Based on nocturnal penile tumescence results 48 patients were assigned to an organic group and the remaining 8 were assigned to a psychogenic group. A discriminant function analysis of questionnaire responses yielded a highly significant discriminant function [chi-square (19) equals 63.88, p less than 10(-6)], and all 56 patients were classified correctly into the nocturnal penile tumescence-defined organic and psychogenic groups. It was concluded that verbally reported data contain diagnostically meaningful information and that such information can compare favorably with information collected through standard laboratory-based nocturnal penile tumescence techniques.