Lilly’s Cialis Helps Erections in Men With Injuries
Nov. 12 (Bloomberg) — Eli Lilly & Co.’s impotence drug Cialis helped men with spinal cord injuries achieve erections that allowed them to have sexual intercourse, researchers said.
Cialis helped improve penetration and increased the frequency of ejaculation, the study found. Spinal cord injury occurs most often in young men, and restoring sexual activity can improve their quality of life, according to research published in today’s journal Archives of Neurology.
More than 200,000 Americans have spinal cord injuries. Each year 10,000 people in the U.S. are disabled from automobile, sports and work accidents, falls or wounds during military service, according to the Paralyzed Veterans of America Web site. Only one-fourth of men with such injuries have erections adequate for intercourse, because in the other three-fourths of the men the spinal cord nerves that send messages from the brain to the penis are damaged, researchers said.
“Loss of sexual function is far more devastating than not being able to walk,” Marcie Roth, chief executive officer of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, in Rockville, Maryland, said in a telephone interview today. “Men are hard-wired to focus on their sexuality. If you can provide them with what they need to begin to address some of the loss of function, it’s going to free them to focus.”
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Eighty-five percent of men on Cialis had improved erections after 12 weeks of treatment, compared with 20 percent who weren’t on the drug, according to the study, led by FranГ§ois Giuliano, a physician at Raymond PoincarГ© Hospital in Garches, France.
Researchers sought to determine whether Cialis boosted intercourse satisfaction, orgasm, sexual desire and pleasure. The effect on sexual function depends on how badly the spinal cord is injured and where the damage occurred, researchers said. The spinal cord is a thick cord of nerve tissue that is an extension of the central nervous system.
“Throughout the world spinal cord injury occurs most often in young men, resulting in negative physical, social and psychological consequences,” researchers said in the study.
Complex Mechanisms.
“Because of the complex mechanisms associated with erectile function, it is difficult to explain the significant improvement in ejaculation and orgasm frequency,” the study authors said.
Cialis is the world’s second-best-selling drug for erectile dysfunction, after Pfizer Inc.’s Viagra. Lilly, based in Indianapolis, previously shared revenue from Cialis with Icos Corp., which it bought this year for $2.4 billion. Third-quarter sales of Cialis rose 27 percent to $311.4 million from the year- earlier period, according to the company.
Giuliano, who works in the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the hospital in France, serves as a consultant to Pfizer and German drugmakers Bayer AG and Schwarz Pharma AG. Lilly paid for the study.
More than 195 patients between the ages of 18 to 66 were involved in the research, conducted in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The two most common side effects experienced by participants who were on Cialis were headache and urinary tract infection. No deaths occurred in the study.