women are twice as likely to be prescribed antidepressants

A new study done with the erectile dysfunction medication Viagra shows that it could be used to treat women suffering from sexual dysfunction. The principal author of the study Professor George Nurnberg from the University Of New Mexico School Of Medicine said that when women were given antidepressants they often suffered from sexual dysfunction as a side effect. In men this problem could often be remedied by giving them the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra however is it not licenced for use by women.

In this research project however 98 women who had been given antidepressants successfully but who were still suffering from sexual dysfunction were given Viagra tablets to take before sex over an eight week time frame. In fact only half of the women were given the real Viagra while the other half were given an identically looking placebo Viagra tablet which contained none of the active ingredients.

The results of the clinical research showed that 73 percent of the females who were given the placebo Viagra reported no improvement in sexual function and 28 percent of the women using the real Viagra tablets said that they experienced no improvement in sexual function. The shows that the real Viagra had a significant clinical effect on the sexual function with the majority of these depressed women.

Pfizer has previously tested Viagra on women but while some women reported increased sexual desire and function when using it, it was thought to be mainly down to the placebo effect of the Viagra and the results were not good enough to licence it for women.

Interestingly however all of these women were only suffering from sexual function problems due to their use of antidepressants which are commonly known to cause this problematic side effect. Many men and women stop taking antidepressants because of the fact that they can have such a big effect on sexual function which in turn can add to depression. Further testing will obviously have to be done on the use of Viagra on women suffering from anti depressant side effects but nevertheless this first test looks promising.

It is worth also noting that women are twice as likely to be prescribed antidepressants as men are and therefore far more of them suffer from antidepressant related sexual dysfunction. The research was published in the journal of the American Medical Association.