Successive new studies reveal that the little blue pill helps prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Believe it or not, sildenafil citrate, patented under the name Viagra by US drug giant Pfizer, was never meant to do the job most people understand it to be able to do today. It was originally created in the late 1980s for a more innocent reason: to treat high blood pressure and chest pains triggered by heart disease.
However, when researchers were conducting clinical trials for the drug, they quickly realised that this drug was a lot better at inducing erections than anything else they were trying to achieve - and one can only imagine the confusion among the participants and researchers at the trial lab centre that day. It didn't take long for Pfizer to figure out that they could repackage this potent little pill as an answer to the big problem of erectile dysfunction. But it's now clear that this little pill can work its magic in yet more unintended ways.
In February this year, researchers at University College London published their findings on nearly 270,000 men who were all 40 or older and had been diagnosed with erectile dysfunction. They found that men who had been prescribed erectile dysfunction drugs like sildenafil (Viagra) and tadalafil (Cialis) had an 18 percent lesser chance of developing Alzheimer’s later on in life compared to men who hadn’t been given one of the drugs in question. This link was even stronger among those who had been issued the most prescriptions - a whopping 44 percent lower.
In June this year, new trials conducted by the University of Oxford revealed that sildenafil didn’t just increase blood flow to the penis, but also to the brain, improving the function of brain blood vessels in patients at a heightened risk of vascular dementia.
“This demonstrates the potential of this well-tolerated, widely-available drug to prevent dementia, which needs testing in larger trials,” says Dr Alastair Webb, Associate Professor at the Wolfson Centre for Prevention of Stroke and Dementia at Oxford University.
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