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Viagra May Be Effective In Decreasing Cellulite

27 Oct, 2009

According to a latest disclosure, Viagra, the Pfizer manufactured drug to treat erectile dysfunction in men, may prove to be effective in decreasing cellulite and further Croatian scientists have put forward this proposal that Viagra can be used as an effective component in cream meant for reducing cellulite.

AKarmela Altabas, a scientist at the Sisters of Charity University Hospital in Zagreb and other colleagues have stated that a moisturizer having Viagra as a specific ingredient is capable of dissolving cellulite as the anti-impotence drug is known to cause fats to break down in test tubes and facilitate blood flow.

AFurther, Karmela Altabas has expressed the hope that a pharmaceutical company would test Viagra for its anti-cellulite effects.

http://www.metronews.ca/

Viagra for her might be on way

20 Apr, 2009

A drug that helps treat erectile dysfunction could also have an effect on a key artery in women, which could lead to an approach to help them, according to research at Medical College of Georgia.

The findings were presented this weekend at the annual meeting of the American Physiological Society, which is part of the larger Experimental Biology 2009 conference in New Orleans.

About 30 percent to 40 percent of U.S. women suffer from some form of sexual dysfunction, according to an article this month in Nature Reviews Urology . Yet compared with men, the problems in women are not easily addressed, said Kyan J. Allahdadi, a post-doctoral fellow in physiology at MCG and lead author of the study.

"There's a huge number of people that are not being treated basically," he said. The MCG team studied the theory that part of the problem in women might be inadequate blood flow. The MCG team looked at the internal pudendal artery in both male and female rats, which plays a key role in supplying blood to erectile tissue, Dr. Allahdadi said. Using sildenafil citrate, otherwise known as Viagra, and two other erectile dysfunction drugs, the researchers were able to get a response from both male and female arteries, he said.

However, the sildenafil got a response from the female arteries at a lower dose and the response seemed to oscillate back and forth from a relaxed to a contracted state, Dr. Allahdadi said.

"The type of response that we observed was drastically different" between males and females, Dr. Allahdadi said.

Sildenafil or Viagra works by inhibiting a specific enzyme called phosphodiesterase-5, which is known to be present in both male and female genital tissue; it is possible that another form of the enzyme in women could account for the different effect, said R. Clinton Webb, the chairman of the Department of Physiology at MCG and a co-author of the study. It could also explain why Viagra does not work in all men, Dr. Allahdadi said.

Sildenafil and other erectile drugs work by relaxing smooth muscle, which increases blood flow in the region, with the help of a chemical called nitric oxide. There are also nerves in the pelvic region that contain nitric oxide that could also be implicated in female sexual dysfunction and could also be affected by the drugs, Dr. Webb said.

"So I think that is why it is more complicated in erectile tissue compared to other blood vessels," he said.

Sexual dysfunction has a high correlation with heart disease (Viagra was originally developed to treat cardiovascular disease) and diabetes.

"Vascular dysfunction goes hand in hand with diabetes," Dr. Allahdadi said. "That's what we're looking at: Is there a breakdown in this normal vascular function, particularly this artery? That's where we're starting our investigation."

The next step might be to look at a disease model of diabetes in animals. But it also means looking at sexual dysfunction in a different way, Dr. Allahdadi said.

"A lot of people see treating sexual dysfunction as treating a lifestyle disorder," he said. "But if in fact we can appreciate it more as potentially an early marker for a cardiovascular event or a condition that may occur in your life, it puts more of a serious note to it."

http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/2009/04/19/met_520928.shtml

For Erectile Dysfunction, Physicians Indicate That Opportunity Exists For Emerging Therapies With Improved Efficacy.

16 Apr, 2009

Healthcare/Schering-Plough/GlaxoSmithKline's Levitra, they are less satisfied with the efficacy of this drug class in difficult-to-treat patient subpopulations. PCPs' satisfaction with available PDE5 inhibitors on key measures of clinical efficacy suggests that opportunity exists for improvement in the treatment of erectile dysfunction patients with comorbid conditions such as hypertension and diabetes.

The new report entitled Erectile Dysfunction: Physicians Seek Improvements in Efficacy for Underserved Patients and Product Differentiation on Onset and Duration of Action finds that a therapy that provides greater improvement in erectile function than Levitra in patients with hypertension and that is priced at a five percent discount to Levitra would earn a 50 percent patient share in the United States and a 40 percent patient share in Europe, according to surveyed U.S. primary care physicians and European general practitioners.

Additionally, while there are several second-generation PDE5 inhibitors in clinical trials for the treatment of erectile dysfunction, interviewed experts do not expect these agents to provide efficacy superior to that of currently marketed drugs in this class. The report also finds that limited reimbursement for erectile dysfunction drugs and the availability of less-expensive generic versions of Viagra beginning in 2012, will constrain the uptake of emerging PDE5 inhibitors.

"Most therapies for erectile dysfunction do not qualify for reimbursement by third-party payers," said Decision Resources Analyst Kathryn Benton, B.S. "As a result, many patients pay out-of-pocket for treatment -- this will be among the factors that will cause premium-priced emerging therapies to struggle to capture market share."

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/146224.htm

The erectile dysfunction drug Viagra may have found a new, potentially life-saving use in hospital pediatric intensive care units, researchers report.

2 Nov, 2007

Australian researchers gave the drug to 15 babies with congenital heart disease who were being weaned from inhaled nitric-oxide therapy, a treatment that ICUs use to help these infants survive.

The researchers found that a dose of Viagra prevented a common life-threatening complication called rebound pulmonary hypertension. They also found that it significantly reduced the amount of time the babies spent on mechanical ventilation and in the ICU.

"Rebound pulmonary hypertension is a very common problem," said Dr. Steven Abman of The Children's Hospital in Denver, who was not part of the study. "This is the most rigorous study that's ever been done to demonstrate that Viagra can prevent this complication."

The study results were published in the November issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

Viagra is useful for treating both erectile dysfunction and preventing rebound pulmonary hypertension because it affects pathways involved in both conditions.

"Viagra enhances the body's levels of cyclic-GMP, a naturally occurring substance that relaxes arteries and reduces their pressure, which is why its primary indication is for men with erectile dysfunction," explained the study's lead researcher, Dr. Lara Shekerdemian of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne.

"However, cyclic-GMP is abundant in the lungs and is the molecule via which nitric oxide acts as a dilator of pulmonary arteries," Shekerdemian said. "That's why its use was explored in the setting of pulmonary hypertension in the newborn."

In the study, Shekerdemian and colleagues gave a single dose of Viagra to 15 infants with congenital heart disease who were undergoing withdrawal from nitric oxide, which is used to relax pulmonary blood vessels in mechanically ventilated lungs. Another 14 infants undergoing withdrawal were given placebo.

None of the Viagra-treated infants developed rebound pulmonary hypertension compared to 10 of the placebo-treated infants. After more than 24 hours, all of the infants who developed rebound hypertension were given Viagra during a subsequent and successful attempt to wean them from nitric oxide.

The Viagra-treated infants also spent less total time on a mechanical ventilator than the placebo-treated infants -- a little over 28 hours compared to 98 hours -- and had a considerably shorter stay in the intensive care unit (47.8 hours vs. 189 hours).

"Although we expected to see an avoidance of rebound, we were not expecting to see these additional benefits," Shekerdemian said. "Any intervention that smoothes their course in the intensive-care unit would have at least a short-term positive influence on their recovery from their underlying condition."

Unless there's some reason for not using Viagra, Shekerdemian said that it should be routinely used as infants are weaned from nitric oxide. "We certainly do so now in our pediatric intensive-care unit," she said.

Many hospitals are already doing just that. "I think it already has become standard clinical practice, because the idea of using Viagra for this is not new," Abman said. "What's new is that this is the first study to look at it with a nice protocol in which they randomized patients and controlled in a blinded way. So it verifies what we've already been doing in clinical practice."

Shekerdemian and her team are now conducting a similar study in the Royal Children's Hospital's Neonatal Intensive-Care Unit to see if Viagra can prevent rebound pulmonary hypertension in premature infants.

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_40844.html