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    Posted Wednesday, November 18, 2009 10:42 AM

    There Is No Such Thing As Female Viagra: Flibanserin Can't Change Why Some Women Don't Want Sex

    Newsweek
    by Barbara Kantrowitz

    Back in the pre-Viagra age, men were actually impotent. Now, guys with a mechanical problem suffer from erectile dysfunction (E.D. in the ubiquitous TV ads), clearly one of Big Pharma’s most successful rebranding efforts. But women have been denied a similar makeover for their sexual problems because no one has yet figured out why some want it all the time and others hardly ever. If you’re too tired, you’re just plain frigid.

    That could change with the announcement this week that a pill that appears to increase sexual desire in women with low libidos. This potential blockbuster, developed by the German drug manufacturer Boehringer Ingelheim, is called flibanserin and it was almost a nonstarter when it was first tested as an antidepressant. Flibanserin didn’t lift mood, but researchers noticed that it had one intriguing quality: it appeared to heighten sexual interest in laboratory animals and humans.

    Could it be Big Pharma’s Holy Grail: a female Viagra? No doubt inspired by the tantalizing possibility of gazillions in worldwide sales, Boehringer paid for clinical trials of flibanserin in nearly 2,000 premenopausal European, American, and Canadian women suffering from hypoactive sexual desire disorder, a controversial diagnosis that reportedly affects as many as one in four women.

    The results, presented earlier this week at the Congress of the European Society for Sexual Medicine in Lyon, France, showed that the women in the trial who took a daily dose of 100 milligrams of flibanserin for about six months increased the number of “sexually satisfying events” (not necessarily orgasm) to an average of 4.5 from 2.8 in the North American arm of the trial, compared to 3.7 in the placebo group.The women on flibanserin also said they were more interested in sex than those taking a placebo.

    Flibanserin won’t be on sale any time soon. Boehringer still needs to get approval from the FDA and other regulatory bodies around the world, a process which could take years.

    Still, the announcement has already ignited the smoldering debate about the causes and even the definition of sexual dysfunction in women. Sex researchers (mostly men) used to believe that healthy women were just like them, always on the prowl for the right moment. Women who didn’t experience a constant undercurrent of sexual desire were considered abnormal.

    But in recent years, female researchers (most notably University of British Columbia psychiatrist Rosemary Basson) have come to a very different conclusion. Basson and her colleagues have found that while men’s sexual progression is essentially linear─from desire to arousal to orgasm─women’s sexuality is more accurately circular, with one positive factor (such as emotional satisfaction or intimacy) reinforcing others and eventually leading to desire and arousal.

    A woman is most like a man early in a relationship, when she is full of sexual excitement over a new lover. But women in long-term relationships tend to need more stimuli, and that means a guy who satisfies them emotionally (doing the dishes always helps) as well as physically. Women may also steer away from sex because of a large number of nonsexual disorders, including depression, alcoholism, hormonal problems, and even vaginal pain with penetration.

    According to Boehringer, the women in the flibanserin study were only suffering from hypoactive sexual desire disorder, not any other condition that could have hampered their sex drive. But that diagnosis is highly controversial. In order to figure out what it means, you have to define a normal sex drive. No one really knows whether normal means wanting sex once a day, once a month or once a year. Sex researchers currently say that a woman’s sex drive is dysfunctional only if she’s unhappy about it, if it causes her personal distress. That’s why the estimate of how many women suffer from sexual dysfunction ranges from 9 percent to as high as 26 percent.

    Such nuance could vanish if Boehringer eventually wins approval for flibanserin. It’s a good bet that right now there are marketers already testing out brand names and a catchy new label for the old frigid. Any ideas?

    Barbara Kantrowitz writes the "Her Body" column for Newsweek.com
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    Member Comments

    Posted By: marlena21 (December 7, 2009 at 5:23 AM)

    I have tried everything. If they release a drug like this I bet it would be a huge seller! .

    http://www.edtrialpack.com/

    Report Abuse
    Posted By: zappa73 (November 28, 2009 at 9:21 AM)

    I believe that Boringyu may have a point in most cases that I've seen.

    Though I'm fit, do dishes, make money ect. and my wife is madly in love with me (so she says, and all non-physical signals point to it).

    But I don't get "it" 2.8 times/month.  We're only 36 w/2 kids and she only works 12 hours/week.  I do the cooking, grocery shopping ect.

    I'd love to see this product come to fruition.

    Report Abuse
    Posted By: lizard42195 (November 19, 2009 at 6:56 PM)

    I wish the media would quit using the term "female Viagra" when they're talking about drugs purported to enhance female libido.  This perpetuates the sorry misconception - mostly among men - that Viagra is an aphrodisiac, which results in some clueless men taking the drug recreationally.  Men with ED do not necessarily have low libido, and if a man is not sexually aroused, all the Viagra in the world will not make a difference.  I know someone whose doctor prescribes Viagra based on his complaint that he sometimes has "trouble getting it up."  The truth is that this guy no longer gets turned on by wifey.  Yet the idiot doctor prescribes Viagra, rather than telling him, "If you're capable of an erection, you don't have ED.  No Viagra for you, bud."

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