Penis Size: The True Average

Not convinced that it’s saying the normal size is 6.6BPEL

The 6.6BPEL figure is from only 17 men in the 0-4 months post surgical group. They have the highest penis sizes in the study. The average is actually 5.9.

And the study goes on to say that this average is similar to another group of patients with a history of ED but without any surgical history. To me this seems to be quite a flaw in the study methodology, as there is no “normal” control group. Without one, who is to say if “men with ED” are even representative of the population as a whole? What if ED is more likely to strike larger penises? I mean, I know that there isn’t supposed to be a correlation, but how do the authors of this study know that? What if the “it takes more blood to fill a bigger penis” concept means that in practice, bigger men are going to be the “most sensitive” to changes in the blood-filling capacity of penile tissues?

Personally I think this could reveal two things: age as a factor, and the effect of drug induced erections on size.

Well that would seriously skew these results, which makes some sense. Not enough to be truly significant in terms of this study, perhaps, but enough to question the integrity of the methodology in terms of using this data for penile size analysis outside of this narrow population. The red flag in my opinion is that the Wessels study gave 5.08 inches NBP, and thats only .2 inches greater than the *flaccid* measured in this study. That disparity is too big to be statistical drift and has to be due to something else.

If what Invisible is saying is true and they were measuring from the underneath, even lying down the measures are inflated for 1/2” - 1” in lenght.

I don’t think this study is helpful for us — It isn’t about penis size among healthy males. It is about penis shrinkage/atrophy after prostatectomy.

It is about a specific population: Men who have had bilateral NSRRP [Prostate Surgery]

The conclusions of the study are that:

“There was a decrease in all penile dimensions after NSRRP” It is worse for guys who already had ED. Most substantial changes occured between month 4 and 8 after the surgery.

They have various theories why this is the case - post surgery neurovascular issues, etc.

It is an interesting article, but does not tell us anything about “Penis Size: The True Average”.

Good point.

Negative. The portion of the study cited says that "The penis length and circumference were initially measured from symphysis to penile tip in the flaccid state in the recumbent position." The pubic symphysis is above the penis:

http://en.wikip … Pubic_symphysis

retention_head,

Great find! Thanks for posting it here. I will add that study to my original post in this thread.

The fact that the authors sampled an ED group doesn’t bother me; if I remember correctly, one of the other studies I listed (the Israeli one?) also focused on an ED population. Of course it may be the case that guys with ED are bigger or smaller than average, but studies of these men are still informative when trying to assess the overall evidence on penis size.

Fantom notes correctly, however, that the average length found in the 100 post-surgical men in this study was 154 mm, or 6.06” BPEL. The average length found in the 130 no-surgery men in the study was 152 mm, or 5.98” BPEL. These figures are similar to those calculated by beenthere on the first page of this thread, when he “adjusted” other studies’ NBP numbers to account for fat pads, and are consistent with my suggestion in the first post in this thread that the average size is likely no greater than 5.5-6.5” BPEL. Still, since these guys were lying on their backs during measurements, and since it sounds like not all of them got great erections, even with the drug injections (the article’s writing is confusing on this point), it’s probably the longest average length I’ve seen in a scientific study. Before any ED atrophy, and with a TP-style measurement (standing with 100% erection, etc.), the guys in this study probably would have averaged slightly over 6.5” BPEL.

Interestingly, if you look at the scatterplots provided by the authors, you can see that lengths in the post-surgical group ranged from about 3.9” to 8.4” BPEL, while the girths ranged from about 3.35 to 5.65” EG. The lengths seem to be distributed on the high side, overall, while the girths seem to be distributed on the low side. Not sure what to make of this.

I still think they were measuring from the underneath or from the side.

Another strange thing is that Trimix and similar drugs gives usually a larger EG and a slightly shorter EL, while there it seems happened the adverse.

If they were somehow measuring length from the side, marinera, that could explain why the girth measurements suggest that these guys were, if anything, below average in size (perhaps due to the ED), but the lengths were disproportionately high. I mean, really — not a single girth over 5.65”, according to the scatterplots, yet a few lengths over 8”? Possible, but seems strange, unless men with long, skinny penises are especially prone to developing ED…

Agree, P-G. Overall, this study raise too many questions/perplexities to be useful, IMHO.

Just to add another point: they were measuring the volume of the penis as it was a cylinder; I think a scientist would use the ellipitc-shaped formula, or some more refined way to measure the changes in volume.

I was just going to make that comment as well, PG.

It would have helped for the authors to provide distribution data as well. But from the scatter plot we can see that there are only 9 men (out of 100) who are over 7 inches BP. And only 12 guys who are over 5.1 girth. That’s about what we expect from other studies and seems to jibe with the anecdotal assessment of what “big” is, at least, the more reasonable views.

On what basis? How could they possibly be doing that and still measure from the symphysis, as they state they did?

Basing on coherence with other surveys, Lamp.

“Recumbent position” means “lying down”.

Yeah, I understand “recumbent”, Invisible. More specifically, it means “lying down on the back”, else they might’ve specified “right lateral recumbent” or “left lateral recumbent”. If I can understand “symphysis”, I can probably understand “recumbent”. (I even know the difference between ‘recumbent’ and ‘prone’.)

But what does the body orientation of lying down, standing up, or standing on the head have anything to do with where the ruler is applied - i.e. starting at the pubic symphysis, above (‘superior to’, in anatomical terms) the penis — in contrast to ‘to the side' (lateral) or ‘from the underneath’ (inferior), as marinera asserts?