resulted in longer living time for the rats

Some good news for the drug companies Pfizer and Bayer is that research involving their erectile dysfunction drugs namely Viagra and Levitra shows that they may be used to help increase the efficiency of cancer drugs. The research that was done using lab rats showed that when they were treated with Viagra and Levitra the chemotherapy drugs given to them went further past the “blood-brain barrier” than those rats who were not treated with these impotence drugs.

The research team from The Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in LA said the rats who had brain tumours lived for on average 42 days when just given a cancer drug called adriamycin, but when they were also given a small dose of Levitra the rats lived for on average 53 days. Dr. Keith Black, the principal researcher for the study said that the lab results made clear that the use of Levitra along with the adriamycin resulted in longer living time for the rats and also in larger reductions in tumour sizes.

Dr. Keith Black went on to explain that the erectile dysfunction drugs appear to have an effect on the blood brain barriers of the actual brain tumour but not on the blood brain barrier of the brain itself. This means that the cancer drug is able to be more active to kill the tumour without at the same time damaging normal brain tissue. One of the big problems with chemotherapy drugs is that as well as killing cancer cells they end up killing healthy cells but the use of Levitra and Viagra appears to reduce this effect.

The Levitra and Viagra drugs which are classified as PDE-5 inhibitors work by boosting blood flow in small blood vessels by dilating them and thus as well as being used to treat erectile dysfunction they have potentially many other applications to treat health problems in the human body. At present the research is at a starting stage but in a few years time using erectile dysfunction medication alongside brain tumor medication could be commonplace.