Men with stable coronary artery disease who are on Viagra due to impotence seem to live longer and have a lower risk of experiencing a new heart attack, a study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology reports.
The little blue pill is known to give men a boost between the sheets but experts say it can also help to increase lifespan, although they are unsure why this is.
A study by the biotech start-up EPITERNA analysed the medical records of 500,000 people in the UK to assess the health outcomes of more than 400 medications and found that males who were prescribed sildenafil – the active ingredient in Viagra – were 15 per cent less likely to die.
Boffins says that the results “warrant further investigation in randomised controlled trials”.
The researchers didn’t indicate how often participants were taking Viagra and the team acknowledged that outside factors – such as diet and exercise – could have had an influence on lifespan.
Additionally, in 2017 Martin Holzmann and colleagues showed that men who have had a heart attack tolerate the drug well and that it even prolongs life expectancy and protects against new infarctions and heart failure.
In their new study, the researchers sought to compare the effect of alprostadil and PDE5 inhibitors in men with stable coronary artery disease. The patients were to have had either an infarction, balloon dilation or coronary artery bypass surgery at least six months before the onset of treatment for erectile dysfunction.
“The risk of a new heart attack is greatest during the first six months, after which we consider the coronary artery disease to be stable,” says lead author Martin Holzmann, adjunct professor at the Department of Medicine, Solna, Karolinska Institutet.
The registry study comprised 16,500 men treated with PDE5 inhibitors and just under 2,000 who received alprostadil. The data was collected from the patient, drug and cause of death registries.
The study shows that the men who received PDE5 inhibitors lived longer and had a lower risk of new heart attack, heart failure, balloon dilation and bypass surgery than those who received alprostadil. The protection was dose-dependent, so the more frequent the dose of PDE5 inhibitor, the lower the risk.
“This suggests that there’s a causal relationship, but a registry study can’t answer that question,” Holzmann says. “It is possible that those who received PDE5 inhibitors were healthier than those on alprostadil and therefore had a lower risk. To ascertain whether it is the drug that reduces the risk, we would need to randomly assign patients to two groups, one that takes PDE5 and one that doesn’t. The results we have now give us very good reason to embark on such a study.”
As PDE5 inhibitors are available by prescription only in Sweden, they cannot be bought over the counter, but Holzmann hopes that men with coronary artery disease do not shy away from addressing the matter with their doctor.
“Potency problems are common in older men and now our study also shows that PDE5 inhibitors may protect against heart attack and prolong life,” he said.
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