Because Women Need Lovin' Too

Listen up, ladies! If you are currently taking antidepressants and experiencing sexual dysfunction, a new study may have the answer to your problem. And, it may have been right under your nose in the medicine cabinet of your male counterpart all along. Yes, Viagra®, the savior drug for men, may also be beneficial for women.

According to CBS Evening News medical correspondent, Dr. Jonathan LaPook, sexual dysfunction affects about half of patients on antidepressants (women more than men). A small study on premenopausal women found Viagra helped to achieve the big "O". However, according to the research report published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it did not improve other sex aspects for women, such as desire or arousal.

Although the study shows promise as a treatment for female sexual dysfunction, Pfizer Inc. (the company that manufactures the little blue pill) currently has no plans to pursue FDA approval of Viagra® use for women. The results of the company's own research proved the drug to be safe but inconclusive in treating women, leading to the study's end in 2004.

When is it going to be the women's turn? Sexual dysfunction treatments for men have exploded onto the pharmaceutical market in recent years. The search for a helper for women leads little to be desired. If Viagra® has the potential of helping depressed women achieve an orgasm, it should be explored further. Depression alone is a serious medical condition. When the treatment for depression is coupled with sexual dysfunction, the situation often worsens. Everyone deserves to be happy and sexually satisfied in life and should not settle for anything less...men and women.

sign me up for a sugar pill

It's midterms, which means my awareness of the world has shrunk to the space between my coffee pot and desk, but a friend insisted that I pay attention to this story right now - and I'm glad he did. PLoS Medicine has just published a report titled Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration; granted, it's one of those titles that doesn't immediately tell you what it's about (and since I'm in the middle of preparing a few abstracts, as well, my brain is itching to red pencil it, but I digress). So what is this unwieldily-titled paper about? According to the succinct title The Guardian gave their report of the issue, it's simple: prozac, used by 40 million people, does not work. From that article,

Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.

The study examined all available data on the drugs, including results from clinical trials that the manufacturers chose not to publish at the time. The trials compared the effect on patients taking the drugs with those given a placebo or sugar pill.

When all the data was pulled together, it appeared that patients had improved - but those on placebo improved just as much as those on the drugs.

The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.

Kirsch and company go on to emphasize that counseling should be the first choice, and medication a very last recourse. But the researchers also go on to emphasize that this raises broad questions about drug data reporting and drug licensing; in an article at BBC News, Dr. Tim Kendall argues that drug companies should be forced to publish all their data, regardless of conclusion - something that many people have been arguing for years, and has come up in this blog recently.

Part of the reason that this is a new, and believed to be groundbreaking study (at least by the researchers) is that Kirsch and colleagues requested the full set of trial data on four drugs (prozac, seroxat/paxil, effexor, and serzone) from the FDA via the freedom of information act; two newer drugs (celexa and zoloft) were excluded because the full information wasn't yet available via the FOA. They argue that this additional and unpublished research shows that there is simply no benefit to the drugs.

Now it should go without saying that this is a research study, and anyone taking these drugs shouldn't decide to stop taking them without first consulting your prescribing physician. That said, while I take an anti-depressant that's not on the list, under the theory that it will decrease the pain I experience by increasing the dopamine in my brain, I think I'll be printing out the PLoS Medicine report and taking it in for a discussion with my own doctor.

Perhaps most to the point, I do agree with the researchers and commentators who say that this, more than anything, emphasizes that all research collected on a medication should be reported - positive, negative, or neutral. It's becoming obvious that we can't trust the FDA to make decisions on the effectiveness of these drugs; that doctors and patients are going to have to become the experts, or at least have all the data at their fingertips in order to make their own informed decisions.

And with that, I ought to get back to midterms. See you all in another day; I've got a collection of things to bring up once I'm out from under this epistemological cloud.
-Kelly