Here’s the Status Update on Viagra for Women
For some women, it doesn’t matter how many Kegels you do or how much lingerie you stock up on — you just can’t find the desire to get between the sheets unless it’s for sleep. Guess what? It isn’t necessarily stress or your relationship issues that are the problem. It could be hypoactive sexual desire disorder, a condition related to your brain function that causes chronic low libido in premenopausal women. Luckily, Sprout Pharmaceuticals has been lobbying for a little pink pill that helps ease this problem… except that they’ve recently come to an impasse with the FDA, which has refused to approve the drug.
Flibanserin, a little pink pill that targets neurotransmitters in the brain (rather than targeting your lady parts), is a non-hormonal drug for women who suffer from HSDD. It increases your brain’s production of dopamine and norepinephrine, which increases sexual excitement, and decreases serotonin, which is responsible for inhibition. In clinical studies with the pill, women with a mean age of 36 found they had an increase in sexual desire, less stress over losing their libido and had more frequent, satisfying sex.
So what’s the hold up then? There are many critics who worry that the side effects — nausea and sleepiness — may not be worth the cure, and there are also those who don’t believe HSDD is even a real diagnosis.
Sprout appealed the drug’s initial rejection by the FDA and is in the process of resubmitting the application, which could take as long as six months to be approved. Unless skepticism about women’s sexual desire and its causes prevails, we could be seeing a fair share of pink-tinted commercials coming our way.
Do you think it’s about time women got their own Viagra? Let us know in the comments.
(h/t via Yahoo! News)
