More 70-year-olds are having good sex more often and enjoying it more than their correspondents three and four decades ago, according to a Swedish study released on Tuesday.

After asking 1,500 older people across a 30-year period about their sex lives, Swedish researchers found that 70-year-olds of both genders are having more sex than they did 30 years ago, and many more women say they are being satisfied with their sex lives.

Septuagenarian women indicated satisfaction with their sexual activities, suggesting they may have benefited more from the relaxing of sexual mores.

Very little is known about what goes on between the sheets for healthy men and women aged 70 and older, in spite of the multitude of literature on the sexual habits and attitudes of younger adults.

Anterior studies have inclined to concentrate on what goes wrong, sexually speaking, which has generated the impression that the sex life of elderly people is dispiriting or absent.

According to Nils Beckman, a doctoral candidate at the University of Gothenburg, that impression is not true.

"Our study shows that most elderly people consider sexual activity and associated feelings a natural part of later life," Beckman said.

Compared to the same age group in 1971, almost twice as many married female septuagenarians told of having sexual contact in 2001, and a distinctly higher percentage said they "always or usually" experienced orgasms, as stipulated in the study.

And, while more than 10 percent of interviewed women 40 years ago had never had sex at all, by the end of the century that percentage had dropped to 0.4 percent -- one female respondent out of 229.

For men, too, sex at 70 on the turn of the 21st century seemed to bring more pleasure than for older men of a previous generation.