Friday, September 08, 2006

Alza - dapoxetine: disease mongering in the bedroom again


Men on SSRI antidepressants, like Prozac and Seroxat, sometimes experience side effects that affect their sexual perfomance.

Some men complain of dulled sexual sensation and delayed orgasm.

Ahha, thought some bright spark!

Lets turn this negative into a positive and see if SSRI's can be used to treat premature ejaculation.

Step up dapoxetine

Today The Lancet publishes the results of trials carried out at 121 centres in the United States. Men were randomly given either placebos or different doses of dapoxetine. As is typical in sexual studies, the placebo proved pretty effective, prolonging intercourse from less than one minute to 1.75 minutes. But the drug did better. A 30mg dose produced 2.78 minutes and a 60mg dose 3.32 minutes.

While hardly Don Juan standard, this was a significent result, marred only by some side-effects.

Nausea, diarrhoea, headache and dizziness were reported.

Nevertheless, the team, led by Professor Jon Pryor, of the University of Minnesota, concluded that dapoxetine was “an effective and generally well- tolerated treatment for men with moderate-to-severe premature ejaculation”.

Source: Times Online

Insider can see the combo-pill with Viagra already!

But where is the "disease mongering" side to this story?

The press are quoting premature ejaculation as being a condition affecting a third of men.

Insider wonders where that figure came from!

So guys, when you and a couple of buddies get together for a beer remember that statistically, one of you is letting the side down in the bedroom department! That's if these figures are to be believed!

4 comments:

early 60s professional living in Jersey exurbia said...

as it turns out that figure is close to being accurate Insider, based on many large epidemiologic studies, one review by Jannini and Lenzi in Current Opinion in Urology 2005, 15:399–403 said this in abstract about one large study (Global Study of Sexual
Attitudes and Behaviors ):


In the past year many articles have been published using the data from the Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors, a large survey that investigated various aspects of sex and relationships among 27 500 men and women aged 40–80 years. Despite some methodological bias, discussed herein, a prevalence of more than 21% seems a realistic figure for premature ejaculation.
Summary Premature ejaculation is the most prevalent sexual dysfunction in every country.

My knowledge about this stems from involvement as a medical expert in an initiative regarding PE. I don't think it is disease mongering, personally. I think the problem exists and can be serious for some couples. It can be very frustrating for the women, ask them about it!

You know wham bam thank you ma'am and all that

PharmaGuy said...

Yeah, the combo pill with Viagra will be marketed to men suffering from "PEED" or premature ejaculation + erectile dysfunction.

See why I think these PE studies are a lot of bull: PEED: A New Viagra Franchise?.

CL Psych said...

I'll agree that there is some element of disease mongering, yet also state that, yes, PE is a relatively widely occurring problem. However, given that the mean duration of intercourse was dragged up to about 3 minutes, I'm not sure that's particularly exciting news.

Sex therapists will likely point out (but will be outshotuted by a tidal wave of pharmaceutical marketing) that a better solution is to have couples focus on acts other than intercourse, including oral sex, which is often more pleasurable to women than intercourse anyway.

Anonymous said...

Dapoxetine is a J&J drug. Sildenafil is a Pfizer drug. These will never be combo'd. This just shows your poor understanding of patents and IP, (but this is pretty obvious by your continual blind championing of generic companies to take a swipe at those who invent). However, UK390957 being developed by Pfizer for PE (according to IMS R&D Focus) may possibly be combined with sildenafil.