(Ivanhoe Newswire) - Heart attack patients looking to get things cooking in the bedroom again need to have a long talk with their doctors. If they don't - they face a whole lot fewer late-night encounters.

An American Heart Association report shows sexual activity declines in the year after a heart attack for patients who don't get instructions from their doctors about when it's safe to resume sex.

In a study of 1,184 male and 576 female acute heart attack patients, less than 40 percent of men and 20 percent of women talked about sex with their physicians following their experience. One year after their heart attack, more than two-thirds of men reported some sexual activity, compared with 40 percent of women. As a result, men were 1.3 times and women 1.4 times more likely to report a loss of sexual activity after one year if they didn't receive information on when to resume sexual activity.

"Sexuality is an important part of life throughout life, and most heart attack patients are sexually active" Stacy Tessler Lindau, M.D. was quoted as saying. Lindau is the lead author of the study and associate professor of obstetrics/gynecology and medicine-geriatrics at the University of Chicago. "For the most part, physicians just aren't discussing this topic with their patients after a heart attack."

Bottom line : the study shows patients who had been given instructions about resuming sexual activity at hospital discharge were more likely to engage in such activity over the following year.

Noting their data are preliminary, Lindau stated further study is required to determine what information the patients were given by their physicians, what patients need to know, and how to tailor information for patients so that they will feel free to ask questions and to seek help.