Even if a teen’s ED turns out not to stem from physical causes, “the answer isn’t go home, relax, you’re fine,” Dr. John P. Mulhall told Reuters Health.

Taking the right approach to treatment in teens is important, according to Mulhall, who’s with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Young men with ED may experience psychological harm that interferes with their sexual function in adulthood, and the earlier treatment is started, he added, the more effective it will be.

In the medical journal BJU International, Mulhall and his team report on 40 males ranging in age from 14 to 19 who came to one of three different specialized ED treatment centers for help. On average, the young men had been having problems for nearly two years. Most were accompanied by one or both parents.

Half of the teens reported having a decreased or absent sex drive, 30 had difficulty achieving spontaneous erection during sexual encounters, and 35 had trouble maintaining erections.

Twenty-five had ultrasound to check penile blood flow, which identified blood vessel problems in 12. The remaining 13 were considered to have psychological causes of erectile dysfunction.

The young men in the study weren’t necessarily having sex, Mulhall noted; for example, they might have simply noticed that while their friends were talking about waking up with erections, this had never happened to them.

“The common theme for most of these teenagers is they are mature,” he added. “You can imagine what a young boy, what a young man has to go through to raise this with his parents and come in and see us.”

When a physical cause of ED is diagnosed, Mulhall said, treatment is often possible, with hormone therapy, for example, if endocrine problems are identified, or vascular surgery for the few with blood vessel problems.

For young men whose ED problems are related to a bad sexual experience or loss of confidence, Mulhall said, the first line of treatment is to give them medication that will allow them to achieve erections when they have sexual relations, along with psychotherapy. Typically, he added, these young men can stop using the medication within 12 months.

Mulhall admits that the idea of treating ED in teens might be controversial to some, but he argues that doing so is crucial to a young man’s sexual and overall well-being. “There’s a real value to nipping things early in the bud so you’re not building up this chronic sense of no sexual self confidence,” he said.

“No 35-year-olds like to think of their parents having sex, nor do they like to think about their kids having sex,” Mulhall added. Nevertheless, he said, “The more open we are with these teenagers the more likely they are to make better decisions.”

SOURCE: BJU International, March 2009.

In that time, it has also been found useful in fighting sickness among mountain climbers, pulmonary hypertension and helping people who have experienced congestive heart failure.

Now a team of researchers at Queen’s University may have found another practical application for the little blue pill - reducing blood clotting around stents that have been implanted in coronary arteries to maintain blood flow.

“The stent works like a charm with respect to re-opening the blood vessel,” said Donald Maurice, professor of pharmacology and toxicology, who heads the project at Queen’s, “but 60% of blood clots form on stents unexpectedly and incredibly quickly, and the end result is usually death.”

After two years of laboratory work, the team of researchers, headed by PhD student Lindsay Wilson, got the results they were seeking. They found that Viagra inhibits the cellular enzyme PDE5 which in turn inhibits the platelet activation that causes blood clotting.

It will now be up to other scientists who perform clinical trials with animals or humans to pick up where the Queen’s group leaves off.

“We’re lab-based scientists figuring out mechanisms and how drugs work,” said Maurice. “We were interested in the enzyme that Viagra inhibits. What we’re doing is very much contrived and reductionist.

“Whether this would be a benefit to the average 70-kilogram guy, we really don’t know.”

Even though it’s been six months since they published their paper, the Queen’s scientists haven’t been contacted about their discovery by the Ontario Heart and Stroke Foundation -which funded half of the project - but the foundation’s director of research said he’s been watching the team’s progress with interest.

“It’s big. It’s good old Canadian know-how, linking two disparate things and bringing them together,” said Marco Di Buono. “This is clearly work building on an existing body of literature. It’s critically important that the ideas don’t just stop. We will call Dr. Maurice to give him reassurances.”

Di Buono said that Ontario Heart and Stroke holds the intellectual property rights to all the research work that it funds in order to protect the scientists’ ability to continue their work. They may be able to link the Queen’s findings with a clinical trials group operating somewhere else in Ontario or Canada.

Viagra could perform its part effectively, never the less but it also accounts for its devastating side effects that include wonky willies flatulence, toothache and hiccups!

A health watchdog reports that the drug has been a demon in responsible for 109 deaths in the UK.

In Britain, more than 1,000 reports are filed listing more than 1,500 side effects.

The drug is prescribed more than one million times a year.

31 patients also complained of a painful medical condition Priapism in which the erect penis does not resume its flaccid state, despite the absence of both physical and psychological stimulation, within four hours. This could be a potentially harmful condition.

Two other patients, though rare, complained of a Peyronieís disease where the male organ begins to take shape of a U-bend. Other side effects include two people who complained of getting deaf and blind.

An MHRA spokesman told the Daily Star Sunday: “The submission of a suspected report does not necessarily mean that it was caused by the drug. Many factors have to be taken into account in assessing causal relationships including the underlying disease that was being treated.” he added.

What are the side effects of Viagra? Read answer on www.ViagraFaq.net

The student at Frome Community College in Somerset brought in the prescription drugs and gave them to fellow students.

Headteacher Wendy Missons would not confirm any details of the suspension, including the ages of the pupils involved.

Miss Missons said the sensitive matter was dealt swiftly.

“It is inappropriate to discuss the details of this case because there is a family involved and I am not going to talk about someone’s private life,” she said.

“Viagra causes a lot of humour in society, especially among teenagers, so it is important to alert parents who have prescription drugs of any kind to lock them away.

“Something with a label like Viagra causes humour and curiosity among children.

“All secondary schools in the country have to deal with drugs issues and we are no exception.

“Our line is firm - any drugs on site, be they legal or illegal, results in exclusion from school.

“There is no place for drug use, talk or culture at Frome Community College.”

The daily version will take pressure off users who would otherwise have a “shot clock” or window of effectiveness to worry about, Lilly officials say. Cialis also is offered at a higher dose that provides a 36-hour window.

With the daily dose, men will not need to take Cialis in anticipation of sex because it is already in their system, said Shawn Heffern, Lilly’s U.S. marketing director for the drug.

Lilly said in a statement the daily dose is geared for men who anticipate having sex twice a week or more frequently.

Cialis rang up $798 million in sales during the first nine months last year. In 2006, it registered $971 million for the full year, a 30 percent increase over 2005.

Heffern said the drug is on track to top $1 billion in sales for 2007. He declined to say how the daily dose will affect revenue.

Cialis trails market leader Viagra in sales. The Pfizer Inc. erectile dysfunction drug collected $1.26 billion in sales during the first nine months of 2007.

The daily dose could increase Cialis sales depending on how it’s priced, said George Farra, co-founder and principal of Woodley Farra Manion Portfolio Management. His firm manages nearly 285,000 Lilly shares.

York District Hospital based in York and the St James University Hospital in Leeds specifically wanted to examine whether the fact that the Cialis erectile dysfunction medication had a longer half life than Viagra and Levitra meant that the side effects would be more severe. The conclusion was that the men who used Cialis were more likely to suffer from the side effects for a longer time but they were not more severe. In fact the researchers noted that men using Cialis reported less problems with one of the PDE-5 side effects which is facial flushing.

Over 400 men were recruited for this study and the results showed that the mean duration for side effects with Cialis was 14.9 hours compared to 3.9 hours for Viagra and 7.7 hours for Levitra. Thirty percent of the men using Cialis said that they had side effects which lasted less than twelve hours. The side effects were measured using something called a Visual Analogue Scale or VAS in which the men responding to the questions could specify their level of agreement or disagreement to a particular statement by marking a position along a fixed line between two points.

The side effects of the erectile dysfunction drugs Viagra, Cialis Levitra tend to be minimal or nonexistent in most men. However they do include headaches, painful red eyes, increased intra-ocular pressure, dizziness and nasal congestion. You should start the use of erectile dysfunction medications with the smallest dose possible and then increase the dose as you see fit.

Always take advice from a doctor and make sure you have a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication before you use it.

Source: http://www.ukmedix.com

The California mother of fourteen was reported as saying “Oh God, I’m going to kill myself,” repeatedly on her way to the Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Centre, 17 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

It took a team of 46 doctors and nurses five minutes to remove the nature-defying brood via Caesarean section - with the eighth taking everyone in the maternity ward by surprise.

“We had done some drills, some preliminary dry runs,” said Karen Maples, a member of the surgical team. “Lo and behold, after we got to tablet G, which is what we expected, we were surprised by tablet H.”

Hospital officials said last night that all eight tablets were doing “very, very well”, with only three partly digested.

The single mother, who is currently unemployed, has come under scrutiny since removal of the tablets on January 26. It is said she has blamed an hormonal imbalance.

She certainly has now.

Sound far-fetched? Maybe not.

A new study suggests the gas responsible for Rotorua’s famous rotten-egg smell also has major benefits for men’s sexual performance.

Scientists at the University of Naples in Italy have discovered a link between hydrogen sulphide and male sexual arousal, sparking claims it could lead to a new class of drugs to combat erectile dysfunction.

The research, published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has surprised Rotorua men and local fertility experts, who say they are not aware of any positive link between the gas and the ability of men to perform in bed.

Rotorua’s Family Planning association spokeswoman Suzy Tetenburg said she was baffled by the study’s findings.

“It’s very interesting, especially for me as a homeopath, but I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to advise clients to inhale the gases at Ohinemutu or Whakarewarewa anytime soon.”

But Rotorua deputy mayor Trevor Maxwell, who lives at Ohinemutu - one of the city’s geothermal hotspots - reckons the study could be used as a selling point to domestic and overseas visitors. “This could be used to promote Rotorua in the same way oysters has done it for Invercargill,” he said.”Already we have hundreds of people coming to Rotorua each year to get married. We should turn this into a positive and promote it as just another reason for honeymooning couples to visit our wonderful city.”

Destination Rotorua Tourism Marketing general manager Don Gunn agreed the research could be used as a “great marketing tool”.

“How you’d build a campaign around it, I’m not sure but if it was done in a tasteful way I think anything that gives us a quirky marketing edge would be fun.”

Last year researchers launched an extensive Rotorua study looking at the long-term health effects of living alongside hydrogen sulphide. The $4 million study, funded by the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, involves researchers from New Zealand and the universities of Otago, Wellington, California and Stanford. Rotorua was chosen because it has the largest population exposed to low levels of hydrogen sulphide in the world. About 1800 locals, aged between 18 and 65, are involved in the study.

One of the study’s head researchers, Dr Julian Crane, said the Naples research was part of growing awareness globally of the important role hydrogen sulphide plays in various bodily functions.

Research involving mice exposed to hydrogen sulphide gas has found it can prompt them to enter a state of hibernation.

Dr Crane said it could lead to further research looking at the potential benefits of exposing people with serious head injuries to hydrogen sulphide to increase their chances of survival. “What scientists are looking at a lot more now is how hydrogen sulphide as a molecule triggers bodily functions like hibernation and exploring its therapeutic role within the penile tissue is all part of that.”

Relatively low effectiveness, large placebo responses, and lack of long-term safety data led to a recommendation against transdermal testosterone for female sexual dysfunction in a review edited by Ike Iheanacho, M.B.B.S., in the March issue of Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin.

The testosterone patch, marketed as Intrinsa in Europe for women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder after surgically-induced menopause, was rejected by the FDA in 2004. The agency cited concerns about unknown cardiovascular and breast cancer risks with chronic use, particularly since concomitant estrogen therapy would be required.

Although some studies have linked postmenopausal sexual dysfunction to low circulating concentrations of testosterone, Dr. Iheanacho’s group (the authors were not named) highlighted flaws in the clinical trial evidence that the patch could reverse this effect.

Randomized controlled trials comparing the patch to placebo have included only a “highly selected” group of women without any physical or psychological conditions that could cause low sexual desire and who were in stable, monogamous sexual relationships, they said.

Furthermore, some of the studies diagnosed hypoactive sexual desire disorder strictly though self-reporting or short, nonvalidated questionnaires.

The reviewers said large placebo responses suggested that the very act of participating in the trial or the visible presence of a patch — whether active or placebo — might have stimulated dialogue and sexual activity between trial participants and their partners. That “undermines the idea that these women had a chemical deficiency that needed rectifying,” they noted.

The FDA and European drug-licensing agency have questioned whether women enrolled were truly sexually dysfunctional, given the baseline of two to three sexual events per month seen in some of the trials.

The agencies also expressed doubt about whether the small increases in sexual activity reported in the trials were clinically meaningful.

One of the two pivotal trials revealed an increase in the frequency of total satisfying sexual activity with the testosterone patch among women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder after surgically-induced menopause (increase of 2.10 episodes per four weeks from baseline of 2.82 versus increase of 0.98 from 2.94 baseline with placebo, P=0.0003).

The second key trial also showed a significant increase in total satisfying sexual episodes during weeks 21 to 24 with the patch compared with placebo (mean increase 1.56 versus 0.73 episodes per four weeks, P=0.001), but without reporting baseline levels.

Another area of concern has been adverse effects. Unwanted androgenic effects — including acne, hirsutism, alopecia, breast pain, weight gain, insomnia, voice deepening, and migraine — occurred in between one in 10 and one in 100 women on the transdermal testosterone patch.

Although typically mild, the androgenic effects reported in the two pivotal trials did not fully resolve for 27% of patients with acne, 57.5% with hirsutism, 39% with alopecia and 40% with voice deepening.

Because the treatment in the trials lasted no longer than 24 weeks, “long-term safety cannot be assured,” the reviewers cautioned.

“For all these reasons, we cannot recommend Intrinsa for the use in women with sexual dysfunction,” they concluded.

Paying attention to women’s personal, relationship, partner function, medical, and contextual issues may be more fruitful than pursuit of hormonal status, they suggested.

“The highest risk for coronary heart disease was in younger men,” says researcher Jennifer St. Sauver, Ph.D. The study was published in the February 2009 issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings. The results suggest that younger men and their doctors may need to consider erectile dysfunction a harbinger of future risk of coronary heart disease — and take appropriate steps to prevent it, says Dr. St. Sauver.

“The importance of the study cannot be overstated,” writes Martin Miner, M.D., in an editorial in the same issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings. The results “raise the possibility of a ‘window of curability,’ in which progression of cardiac disease might be slowed or halted by medical intervention,” writes Dr. Miner, who practices at the Men’s Health Center, Miriam Hospital, Providence, R.I.

Erectile dysfunction is common, and prevalence increases with age. It affects 5 to 10 percent of men at age 40. By age 70, from 40 to 60 percent of men have the condition.

Dr. St. Sauver says researchers wanted to learn more about the connections between age, cardiovascular disease and erectile dysfunction. Two previous studies, both published in 2005, laid groundwork for the Mayo Clinic study. One found that erectile dysfunction predicted an increased risk of heart disease, but the erectile dysfunction of the study participants was not assessed with an externally validated questionnaire and cardiac events were not subjected to standardized review for diagnostic accuracy [Thompson et al, JAMA, 2005]. The second predicted that future cardiovascular disease would be higher in younger men with erectile dysfunction, but wasn’t able to follow the men to determine if heart disease developed [Ponholzer et al, Eur Urol, 2005].

For the Mayo Clinic study, the investigators identified 1,402 men who lived in Olmsted County, Minn., in 1996 and did not have heart disease. Every two years for 10 years, these men were assessed for urological and sexual health.

Answers to questions from the Brief Male Sexual Function Inventory, a statistically validated questionnaire, were used to determine erectile dysfunction. The baseline prevalence of erectile dysfunction in study participants was: 2.4 percent in men aged 40-49; 5.6 percent in men aged 50-59; 17 percent in men aged 60-69 and 38.8 percent in men 70 years and older. Those initial data and the increasing incidence of erectile dysfunction over time were linked to data from a long-term study of heart disease in Olmsted County residents, led by Veronique Roger, M.D., Mayo Clinic cardiologist.

Over 10 years of follow-up, researchers found that men with erectile dysfunction were 80 percent more likely to develop coronary heart disease compared to men without erectile dysfunction. The highest risk of new heart disease was seen in the youngest study participants who had erectile dysfunction. In men 40 to 49 years old when the study began, the number of new cases in men with erectile dysfunction was more than 50-fold higher than in men without erectile dysfunction. Statistically, that’s a cumulative incidence of 48.52 per 1,000 person years in those with erectile dysfunction compared to 0.94 per 1,000 person years in those without erectile dysfunction).

In men in their 50s, 60s and 70s, the total incidence of new cases of heart disease also was higher in those with erectile dysfunction. However, the differences were not as striking as those seen among the 40- to 49-year- olds.

“In older men, erectile dysfunction may be of less prognostic importance for development of future heart disease,” says Dr. St. Sauver.

This study did not determine reasons for the increased risk of heart disease among men with erectile dysfunction. Some have theorized that erectile dysfunction and coronary artery disease may be different manifestations of the same underlying disease process. A buildup of plaque that can block arteries around the heart may plug the smaller penile arteries first, causing erectile dysfunction. Alternatively, arteries may lose elasticity over time, contributing to heart disease. This arterial stiffening may affect the smaller penile arteries first.

Other Mayo Clinic researchers were: Brant Inman, M.D.; Debra Jacobson; Michaela Mc Gree; Ajay Nehra, M.D.; Michael Lieber, M.D.; Dr. Roger; and Steven Jacobsen, M.D., Ph.D.