Some 200,000 Internet users are hooked on porn sites, adult chat rooms, or other online sex materials, say Stanford and Duquesne University researchers in what's called the first study of its kind - with the researchers calling it a "hidden public health hazard exploding, in part, because very few are recognizing it as such or taking it seriously."
The study is published in the March issue of the journal Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity. It says such users are "cybersex compulsive" if they spend more than eleven hours per week with sexually oriented online areas and scored high on a questionnaire about relationships and attitudes toward sex.
The researchers also found evidence compulsives have more problems with relationships and jobs than Web surfers who visit X rated sites casually, says the Associated Press.
Previous studies looked at how many visited porn sites and how much time they spent, but virtually none tried to estimate the number of compulsives, San Diego professor Mark Wiederhold tells the AP.
Study leader Al Cooper, clinical director at San Jose's Marital and Sexuality Centre and Standord's training coordinator for counseling and psychological services, tells the AP the conclusions are conservative but significant. They "point…to a huge number we can't ignore," he says, even accounting for such factors as whether some participants may have lied or denied any such problems.
They did, however, throw out incomplete responses or multiple questionnaires which seemed to come from the same participant, keeping 9,265 surveys from those aged 18-90. With 96 of those people (1 percent) fitting their definition of cybersex compulsives, they applied the percentage to the estimated 20 million who visit sexual Web sites each month and defined a figure of 200,000, the AP says.
