The mysterious disorder, known as post orgasmic illness syndrome or POIS, causes flu-like symptoms including fever, runny nose, stinging eyes and sudden intense fatigue after an orgasm.
Dutch researchers set out to document the allergic reaction to sex -- which can last as long as a week -- and test a common allergy treatment in their 45 Dutch male participants.
"Some of the symptoms may be very confusing to the clinician, especially during flu season as well as during allergy season," Dr. Cliff Bassett, medical director of Allergy & Asthma Care of New York, told AOL Health. "It's a difficult diagnosis because many of the symptoms are similar to those of allergy, flu and colds."
Led by Marcel Waldinger, a professor of sexual psychopharmacology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the scientists conducted two separate experiments on the illness -- which was first reported on in medical journals in 2002. Their subjects were all men who'd been diagnosed with POIS.
"They didn't feel ill when they masturbated without ejaculating," Waldinger told the Toronto Sun. "But as soon as the semen came from the testes ... after that, they became ill, sometimes within just a few minutes."
For one of two studies published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 33 were given a typical skin allergy test using their own, watered-down semen. About 88 percent of that group, or 29 of them, had a positive allergic reaction -- an auto-immune response to the semen that caused the cold- and allergy-like symptoms.
In the second study, the researchers tried a treatment known as hyposensitization therapy, which gradually exposes the body to increasing amounts of the allergen over a few years.
The men who were injected with their own semen, first in an ultra-diluted solution and then in a less and less diluted formula given in subsequent shots, showed a significant improvement in their symptoms after one and three years, according to the Sun.
"It's a very slow process," Waldinger said. "It is used for all sorts of allergies and can sometimes take up to 5 years. ... These results are a very important breakthrough in the research of this syndrome."
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