Study: Viagra Not Harmful To Heart
Viagra. How safe is it?
A new industry-sponsored study finds the anti-impotence drug does not produce any dangerous heart-related side effects in men who have heart disease.
The finding reinforced the opinions of the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, which have said that Viagra is safe for patients with stable heart disease as long as they are not taking nitrate-containing drugs such as nitroglycerin.
Pfizer, which paid for the study, makes Viagra, a drug also known by the generic name sildenafil.
Details of the study are in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
Concern about a link between heart problems and Viagra surfaced after the manufacturer began receiving reports of Viagra users who suffered heart attacks soon after taking the drug.
Many men with erection problems also face a higher risk of a heart attack because they tend to be older, have diabetes, and suffer from high blood pressure and high cholesterol.
"One hypothesis has been that nitrates and Viagra brought blood pressure to precipitously low levels," said the study's chief author, Dr. Howard C. Herrmann of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Another was that men who did not realize they had heart disease put too much stress on their hearts by having sex. A third theory held that the heart attack-Viagra link was just a statistical quirk "and these people would have had heart attacks whether or not they used Viagra," he said.
"A fourth hypothesis was that Viagra did something bad to the heart," said Hermann. "That's what we tried to dispel with this study."
To explore that link, Herrmann and his team tested 14 impotent men just before they were about to undergo surgery to have their blocked heart arteries reopened. They measured blood pressures and blood flow in several key arteries before and after the volunteers took Viagra.
They found the drug produced no change in blood pressure and, if anything, may have made it easier for blood to flow through the heart.
Viagra, Herrmann said, was originally being tested as a drug to relieve the chest pain of angina when researchers stumbled onto its erection-building properties.
Since its introduction in April 1998 doctors have written 19 million prescriptions for Viagra for more than 6 million men, Pfizer said. The company earned $333 million from the drug worldwide during the first quarter of this year, a 73 percent increase from the first quarter of 1999.
For a variety of reasons, men wait an average of five years before they seek medical help for impotence.
To avoid the problem, doctors recommend regular medical checkups, starting with once a year before age 45, twice a year thereafter.
Other preventive measures include getting down to one's ideal weight, eating right, exercising regularly, taking a daily vitamin/mineral pill, avoiding smoking and taking n more than two drinks of alcoholic beverages per day, preferably less.