There is Viagra, but no dementia?
Another study found that patients taking sildenafil were more than 50% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) than other people.
Curing cancer is more valuable than curing dementia. Investments at the end of the last century to treat heart disease, stroke and cardiovascular disease, the leading killers, have reduced mortality and increased life expectancy by about five years. The health problem that modern people have to worry about is: Can you survive heart disease at 50 years old, cancer cells at 60 years old, and Alzheimer’s disease at 70 years old? As the population ages, dementia has become a nearly helpless problem for the medical community in recent years. There are many preventive methods to reduce risks. Healthy living habits are a cliché. Reading frequently may also be one of the methods. However, once the disease occurs, dementia is still an incurable disease.
A recent study was shared with you earlier. Among the 406 commonly prescribed drugs in the UK, users of 14 of them had significantly longer lifespans, including sildenafil, the main ingredient of Viagra. Why? Sildenafil is a phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE-5) inhibitor. A beautiful misunderstanding occurred when it was accidentally discovered that sildenafil could relax the smooth muscle of blood vessels in the penis and increase blood inflow when it was being developed to treat cardiovascular diseases. It later became a drug for the treatment of male erectile dysfunction. The business opportunities brought about by the aging population have earned Pfizer (and later Vizil) billions of dollars in annual revenue since the Viagra brand was launched in 1998. Until three years ago, data from a study of first-time insurance claims showed that patients taking sildenafil had a significantly lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Recently, another analysis of observational data supports this finding:
“These real-world patient data validation and mechanistic observations from patient iPSC-derived neurons further suggested that sildenafil is a potential repurposable drug for AD. Yet, randomized clinical trials are warranted to validate the causal treatment effects of sildenafil in AD.”
More clinical testing is needed to prove the efficacy of sildenafil in Alzheimer’s disease. If this is another beautiful misunderstanding, it will help explain the phenomenon of Viagra extending life.
